#like they aimed for the same themes and stuff. idk how else to explain it bms events are a strange strange thing that i do not get fully

[alpinelogy]

george for the ask games please <3

give me a character and i will tell you which song(s) remind me of them give me their vibes

George George George. So many options, I will justify a few and then I'll do a quickfire round with no explanations most likely

T+ VS SHARK feels like such a chaotic shitpost of a joke that went too far and somehow became an actual serious song that is like... third in the entire album, behind only one other serious song and the introduction. Idk if that is the origin of the song but it has that vibes to me and fits George to a T with the serious-unhinged juxtaposition

Honestly this is a purely biased pick -- people sleep on Bad Elixir cause it is not the most classic xi out there, people sleep on George for a variety of reasons and I will defend both to death. Ergo, Bad Elixir and George are holding hands to me. They are besties. They hang out in the same box in my head

Also associate this one with George for two reasons: first of all I was obsessed with this song back when I got into F1 (and became a George fan mostly to be a contrarian cause my fiend hated him and then it stopped being a bit one week in and I genuinely liked him ever since), second of all... idk, unfortunately I operate on vibes and vibes only in this household. It is however very chaotic and unhinged which is very George to me

I know you saw my Lewis post and the same reason for that applies here. Its a fucking fanfic. World Vanquisher you will forever be famous if I ever finish writing that time travel fic. Also it still fits his vibes, especially the more fancy ones when he wears a suit 🙂‍↕️ (linking the long version here. idk if i like the short or longer both therefore i am stealing this opportunity to link both in a way)

Quickfire rounds:

He's one of my first favorite drivers -> very tangible impact on me creating my AO3. I stole my AO3 username from AttraqtiA -> they are holding hands

Fic reasons. Time travel part 2 one day maybe (2026 at the earliest at this rate 💀)

Yes this is where I stole my Saga graphics names from. I was obsessed with these songs in August

Finally one last song becasue I can only put in 10 songs according to tumblr: World Ender my beloved. Also deeply associated with time travel George. Is it obvious that I adore time travel George?

[three--rings]

Sorta random thoughts on having finished Little Mushroom. I intend to do an actual rec/review post soon but these are my spoilery thoughts:

First of all, I did not expect this book to be so damn Christian, that was kinda weird. At first it was just like Christianity as literary themes but then it seemed by the end like the author was expressing genuine Christian faith type stuff which....isn't bad, just very unexpected.

(I standby the An Zhe as Jesus allegory though. Mushroom Jesus is real.)

My one real criticism with the book overall is that it never explains why Lu Feng could somehow tell xenogenics better than anyone else. Like I get that that's the burden he took on and why he killed so many, but we don't get any explanation for HOW and it really feels like...extraordinary ability. I was expecting a reveal of a mutation or something.

The dystopia stuff in this novel is SUPER interesting and feels very realistic, especially coming from a Chinese perspective? IDK I was very aware of the cultural perspective while reading it. And in the first half it feels like it MIGHT be aiming at a critique of authoritarian regimes, but at the same time there's the acknowledgement that this is necessary. And while I feel like overall the author isn't supportive of the base leaders and policies, they avoid really taking it that far. Like, the book still comes down on the side of Lu Feng being right for all the killing he did, because it allowed the base to survive as long as it did. And that's...not untrue. But I think it could have come down harder on the system that rejected the fusion faction. And judged more for the decisions that left humanity SO SMALL.

IDK it's a very thought-provoking novel and I enjoy it so much for that. It's a genuinely hard scenario without clear answers and I do respect the author for not providing an easy morally correct option. I do wish we'd gotten more exploration of Lu Feng's inner life and his struggle, painful as it would be. Because by the time we're really communicating with him, he's like "no I'm fine I'm not troubled by it at all." Which..yeah man IDK.

It's definitely a novel and setting that will stick with me because it's such a fertile ground for thinking and imagining.

Interested in thoughts of others who have read it.

[janiedean]

Hi! I'm the Plato anon for before. First of, thank you so much for your offer, but I think I managed on me own. Second, could you elaborate on the "analysing as YA" vs "analysing as an adult" approach? I assumed that "discourse people" on this website generally don't go beyond "antagonist is bad because they are against the hero!" out of ignorance/lack of interest except to score Internet Fame Points, not that it was due a specific mindest. I also don't really read YA (except Tiffany Aching)

TIFFANY ACHING!! T_T ANON LET ME HUG YOU it’s like the only YA I actually liked in my entire life apart from nick hornby’s one book but that wasn’t typical lmao

THAT SAID, well your discourse people point is pretty much part of it but since I’m here and I can rant have the entire thing I was too tired to hash yesterday ;) so, in order:

first thing, we need to establish that ya books and **adult** books generally have different target audiences which is fine and good because obviously if you want to write a thing you’ll do that for An Audience That You Have In Mind; this doesn’t mean that adults can’t read ya or that teenagers can’t read **adult books** because everyone can read what they want (and personally for one I never cared for ya in my entire life not even when I was the target audience), but it simply means that some books are meant to be liked by one category first and eventual others later and they need to be talked about in that specific context first and everything else later - then there might be books that are aimed for kids/young readers or sold like that or that can be read on more than one level which can be appreciated for different things later in time (for example I read huck finn at sixteen and I absolutely loved it but it was a book that here is seen as good reading material also for eight year olds, and at eight I wouldn’t have liked it for the reasons I did at sixteen, and if I read it now I would still like it, while a bunch of the books for kids I read when I was seven is stuff I enjoyed then but forgot now and probably was good for that age but didn’t stick with me);

second thing, that means that when I discuss a young adult book aimed at teenagers I will never hold it to the standards I would hold a book aimed at a general adult audience, especially if it’s the kind of ya like dunno as stated the vampire diaries aimed at teenage girls which is obviously the kind where you have the fantasy world with the hot dark guy who swoons the high schooler protagonist off her feet etc because that stuff is basic teenage girl fantasy 101 and like... I’ll expect a bunch of romance tropes, the usual push and pull, the guy eventually being into her, the protagonist being someone a fourteen year-old can see herself in, probably a few sexual elements thrown here and there and so on, because that’s the shit marketed at fourteen year-olds who want to read that and like... it’s really not that deep. I can’t ask the vampire diaries to be moby dick because it’s not meant to be. or, if I read percy j/ackson - which is another thing I have zero interest in but I know about because I see tweets from the author - I expect to have a bunch of teens coming into their own coming from different backgrounds because the author wants to represent properly a lot of categories so most of his readers can have someone they can see themselves in and like if a thirteen year-old who suspects being lgbt or whatever sees themselves in the gay kid from per/cy jackson guess what that’s what that book is for, so I won’t judge it on like... being a faithful representation of greek myths or how good the style is or whatever, because even if to me it’s not top notch writing or has a plot idc about it has to be for teenagers and pre-teens, not for me, a thirty year old who again didn’t even like pre-teen aimed literature when she was a pre-teen;

third, I can extra clarify it using the damned hp discourse, as in: when I say I’m tired of people not reading anything else or reading everything like hp, it means that they read it when they were growing up/were teens and it was aimed at them which is fine, but then twenty fucking years later when the people in question are way beyond their twenties (guys I’m almost 32 and I remember when the first one came out come on) when talking about any single piece of media in existence (movies, comics, other books) use hp characters/situations as the terms of paragon - like guys I had to read sn/ape comparisons with theon and ky/lo ren on the basis that THEY’RE GREY CHARACTERS as if sn/ape is the only grey character that ever existed, people keep on talking about vold/emort as the only bad guy that ever existed and so on, and like... you can’t talk about, idk, asoiaf or any book aimed at an adult audience like you’d talk about hp, because at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if I read comparisons between sn/ape and ivan karamazov and I think I don’t need to specify how completely nonsensical that would be;

now, with all of this explained, what I mean is: ya in general - which is not a fault per se of the genre since it’s aimed at teens and pre-teens - tends to have... very fixed narrative schemes depending on which teens it’s addressing - like, stuff like tvd or twilight is obviously the romance teenage girl fantasy where you have the girl fighting to be with the dark beautiful supernatural creature in question, per/cy jackson is more like I’ll give you a bunch of relatable characters having cool adventures against bad guys with the occasional redemption so we can see that people are redeemable but you still have right vs wrong, hp is sort of like that in the sense you get relatable-ish protagonist with relatable friends growing up throughout the entire thing and fighting on the good side vs the evil side including the usual death of the mentor plus people who seemed bad actually not being bad™ except that PJ has more povs and better rep from what I gather but that’s not the point so it’s basically the growing up journey for the young protagonist(s) the kid sees themselves in, then there’s stuff like hunger games where you actually have the dystopian worldbuilding just written to be enjoyable by younger people who don’t want to get too depressed (and ngl I haven’t read the books but I’ve seen the first two movies and guys the way everyone ignores the classist commentary in thg to discuss the love triangle is... a staple of the problem tbh) but still try to introduce deeper themes and have more nuanced characters and at the same time are still written to be enjoyed maybe by the more adult side of the target, and at the same time I can’t say that thg is the same as 1984 when it comes to target audience because 1984 doesn’t make the ugly dystopian themes more accessible using the love story/teenage protagonist etc;

at this point the problem is: if you only ever read ya and nothing else in your life (which is what a lot of people here do - guys again when I got here in 2011 if people didn’t discuss hp they discussed john gr/een, the only *adult*-aimed book I see discussed on tumblr is asoiaf... because of got X°DDD) then you end up seeing every other piece of literature expecting what you do out of a young adult and then you expect adult literature out of young adults/ya to approach certain implications the way an adult novel would, which is... frankly ridiculous;

specific examples: I see blogs which are principally about like ya fantasy books ie acotar or shadow/hunters or whatever shitting on grrm because AAAAH HE’S PROBLEMATIC/MISOGYNIST/HE HAS VIOLENCE AND RAPE IN THE BOOKS BLAH BLAH and like... spoilers: if I wrote a fantasy series aimed at fourteen year-olds who want their fantasy romance with the hot dark guy who is maybe a tiny bit problematic but turns their leaf for them I would hold back on blood and violence, if I wrote a fantasy for adults where I want to be realistic about misogyny I will not, and the fact that grrm gets judged on what happens and not how he writes it (and again, saying that a guy who has 1/3rd of his pov characters female except that it’s actually 50/50 because there are no throwaway povs except for mel while guys have a lot more of them and all the female povs have narrative weight [and mel has it before she gets one] and all of them have a different personality and he also has the same trope [brienne and arya] in two people with wildly different personalities and needs which is basically a goddamned miracle is a misogynist because there’s misogyny in his fantasy world is ridiculous imvho) which is.... exactly expecting of asoiaf what you’d expect out of acotar, when grrm and acotar’s writer write for wildly different audiences. now, if I had read acotar at 15 and asoiaf at 15 I’d have had no doubt re asoiaf being more my thing because again the subgenre acotar goes for is not my thing because I never related to that fantasy while brienne is my rep, but in general a 14yo girl who likes the acotar-like stuff will not care for grrm.... which is normal because grrm writes for adults of both genders, not teenage girls (I mean teenage boys also have their own subgenres for which the same rules are valid), and someone who likes percy jackson (aimed at both genders but like... pre-teens early teens) who doesn’t gaf for grrm won’t because it’s not aimed at them unless they like grrm for other reasons ie idk they realize that they relate to jon snow idk but you see my point, so like tldr that’s what I mean with if you only read ya you’ll expect adult writers to handle their themes like ya writers would and like... sorry but if I write stuff for adults I won’t feel the need to specify that the bad guy is B A D with neon lights because an adult should grasp that from the narrative, I don’t need to make sure it’s obvious bc it’s aimed at kids;

reverse: when I see people saying ‘the vampire diaries is problematic because it’s about people who are a hundred years old preying on teenage girls so we need to stop teenage girls from reading that kind of thing because it makes them think it’s okay to go with someone that much older than them’, we’re at the opposite problem in the sense that you’re asking a young adult novel what you would ask of AN ADULT NOVEL when there’s no point in it. like, a teenage girl knows perfectly that damon salvatore doesn’t exist and vampires don’t exist and werewolves don’t exist - the entire point of tvd is that she gets to fawn over the hot supernatural dude who changes for the better thanks to the female protagonist she most likely sees herself in and she gets to have a few nice fantasies about that which is like... normal for people who are developing their sexualities, most people wouldn’t actually want damon salvatore the way he’s exactly in canon irl because they know it’s a fantasy and so it should stay. like, sorry but as someone who watched the show because ian somerhalder is hot in her twenties and tried the first book and gave it up at page 30 because I couldn’t do it, I can 100% assure anyone that the biggest issues with tvd books are that the writing is really fucking bad (for my standards at least), with the tvd show that from S4 the writing spiraled downwards and no one wanted the magical vampire pregnancy witch twins ridiculousness, but none of the content actually was shit that anyone would take seriously like that and I wouldn’t expect tvd to approach that subject realistically. if I read a vampire book aimed at adults who actually wants to write such a relationship as creepy WELL YES OF COURSE I’D EXPECT IT TO BE OBVIOUS ABOUT IT BEING CREEPY, but if it’s aimed at freaking teenagers... it’s a fantasy and not really that deep, take it for what it is and let teenage girls enjoy thinking about smooching damon salvatore (or stefan or whoever) without assuming they need to be protected from Horrible Vampire Fiction™, same as no one goes bitching about unrealistic sex scenes in serialized romance books because people read them because they’re unrealistic and escapism, not because they expect nobel prize worthy exploration of themes from them;

now, ^^^^^^ would not happen if people actually read variedly and studied some decent lit analysis in school - but like, after I had to read I think at some point that of mice and men is ableist... THAT’S the damned point - with ya you can take a lot of the plot at face value, with adult lit you can’t and you have to see motivation beyond the action of the characters and you can’t do that if you only read books aimed at pre-teens/teenagers where obviously that’s... more spelled out than it would be in a book aimed at an adult audience;

that by the way also means wildly missing actual adult themes discussion in ya, because again, I haven’t read thg but from the two movies I’ve seen it’s fucking obvious that the whole thing is an anti us-classism commentary from how the districts are built to how the games are rigged to pretty much everything in the worldbuilding, but all the discourse I see on tumblr is about either the love triangle or katniss being miscast or president snow being a jerk and whatever else, but I never once saw anyone saying ‘heeeeey the people in katniss’ district are an in your face metaphor of poor people in the us of a belonging to certain categories while the first few districts are absolutely the 1% and the entire point of it is that she wants to tell you A CLASSIST SOCIETY IS BAD AND WILL LEAD TO REVOLUTIONS’, which to me was... like, glaring, it was literally what 90% of the entire thing was about and no one ever discusses it in a fandom-wide sense (I mean... I saw a bunch of hg posts back when the movies came out, I never saw this brought out), which... is a problem because it means that the moment people are put in front of a ya product that actually tackles that kind of issue.... they go and worry about the love triangle (which seemed to me the excuse to draw the people in the story) not about the social commentary, and like, maybe a twelve year-old won’t catch on the social commentary, a twenty-year old especially from the us should, and I don’t see that happening;

and sorry but that is because if you only engage with content aimed at a younger audience than your target first you assume that every piece of literature should be consumable/readable/enjoyable by a younger audience (and sorry but no, some of us don’t want to write stuff making sure teenagers like it) and then ask of actual ya media to cater to their *adult* needs and not to the needs of the target audience because wow obviously if you’re 25 you won’t want out of literature what you wanted at fourteen;

and this also is valid for children’s media because again, I’m cutting it short, but adults watching st/even universe and sending people death threats because they don’t agree with their opinion of a cartoon aimed at an audience that’s at moooostttt eight years old is a thing that shouldn’t even fucking exist, and if you think steven/universe is that important at an adult age you need to re-assess your priorities;

tldr: adults should not expect media aimed at kids/teens to cater to their interests and shouldn’t analyze it the way they’d analyze a piece of media aimed at an adult audience and should not presume that every piece of media should have the scope/schemes of medias aimed at kids/teens because some of us don’t want to read that.

now, I’ll leave you with a nice short anecdote which hopefully will further clarify what I mean and add to another point which would be, kids and teens don’t give a fuck about what you, an adult, do: when everyone was in a frenzy about my little pony back in 2013 or so I had to see a ton of posts like ‘AAAAAH MEN/BOYS WHO ARE INTO MLP ARE STEALING THE SHOW FROM YOUNG GIRLS HOW DARE THEY ENJOY IT WE NEED TO KICK THEM OUT’ with added people saying that a ten year old male kid who tried to kill himself bc his friends bullied him bc he liked mlp deserved it and the likes, my only thought was that... when I was 8-10 in elementary school and was actually the target for cartoons and stuff, sailor moon was the rage between all girls my age me included, we’d spend recess playing pretend (and I’d get stuck playing sailor mars bc no one wanted her, sad) and our hugest first world problem in existence was that we needed technically a mamoru and of course no self-respecting boy in elementary school would have admitted under death threats to watching sailor moon because it was a girls’ thing (aaaaah gender roles in the early-mid 90s, how fun) so everyone despaired because ofc no one wanted to play mamoru... and the few times any guy actually showed up like HEEEEY I WANNA DO IT BUT PLEASE DON’T TELL MY FRIENDS I LIKE SAILOR MOON we’d all be like OMG YOU’RE OUR NEW FAVORITE PERSON PLEASE YOUR SECRET IS SAFE because we couldn’t believe we found the magical boy™ who wanted to do it, and if anyone had told us that the kid in question was stealing sailor moon from us we’d have laughed in their face.

like.

kids don’t ask of media what you, an adult do, and it’s unfair of you, an adult, to ask children’s/ya media to cater to your damned interests, which are amply catered to by the tons of adult literature around which also forces you to push on your views and read more challenging things and to not read/watch stuff at face value, which is why I would really appreciate it if the amount of 20yo people on here who I consider adults engaged with more adult media and let themselves be challenged instead of just going back to ya/kids’ things, which are good for teens and kids and can be enjoyed by everyone but should not be the only goddamned genre you measure all other literature against because then you get people saying that lolita is pro-pedo when it’s exactly the goddamned contrary, but if you think that pov character = protagonist = good guy (which is... staple kids/ya stuff for obvious reasons) then you decide that humbert humbert is someone you’re supposed to root for. too bad that you’re not and the author was an actual csa victim so it’s a completely ridiculous reading that wouldn’t happen if you didn’t read lolita the way you read hp.

... okay, I’m done, sorry for how long this was, I hope it cleared things for good xD

[schtroumpf-a-lunettes]

under cut because long!!! this is roughly a discussion of like, children’s media (or something propped up as children’s media/parodying a kid’s show) being depicted with grimdark and/or mature content or w/e. I both agree that these ideas are often completely unoriginal and boring and stuff and bad. but also it can be done right and have plenty of merits. and in saying that, that’s not what my fic is trying to do as well though

I think I’m edging (relatively) closer to looking like a little bit of a hypocrite if I agree with the notion that portraying characters from children’s media in dark situations tends to be boring/unoriginal/edgy and I don’t know how to, fully express how much that I... well for one thing that’s not.. what I ever really want to go for. many of those kinds of portrayals are generally irreverent, wildly OOC, edgy for the sake of being edgy, purely for shock value. Sometimes the person doing it doesn’t rly know anything about the source material beyond the most basic surface level, and it furthermore can be boring if it doesn’t offer any meaningful commentary. ofc those things don’t usually intend to offer meaningful commentary, they just want the shock value of something like “haha the SMURFS but VIOLENCE/ADULT CONTENT, wild right???”, and they achieve that very basic goal, and it can be boring. it doesn’t tell us anything, it’s just, shock value and that’s it.

Ok I mean... it DEPENDS, sometimes (plenty of times) I actually find the Subverted Kids Show trope incredibly enjoyable, but like, hm. some ways of going about it are more tasteful than others. I guess part of that is personal preference though I do think there is a small amount of objective guidelines involved too

and you can still make insightful commentary on a text aimed at children through a Subverted Kids Show Format while having the characters be ooc! Robot Chicken smurfs (which I will discuss more in other posts) for me oscillates between making a surprisingly good commentary sometimes and mindless (but fun(ny)) scenes to, very tasteless/bad scenes that don’t do much imo. well its goal is to be funny and that’s it I guess, and it hits that goal some of the time

I guess the exact opposite of the surface-level shock value joke can also be super boring though. a text/theory that takes itself super seriously and tries to explain to you how Actually This Kid’s Show Dark! can possibly be even worse. e.g. “characters in kids show are just trapped in purgatory/it’s all a coma fantasy!!” or whatever. But I think, part of what would make a thing like that Bad is a fundamental misunderstanding of core parts of the canon and/or a... lack of regard for canon in the sense that you’re really willing to sit here and write of everything that the characters have ever been through as being Meaningless because it was all just one character’s dying memories? that completely robs the text of its power. Like saying Homer’s been in a coma since like season 5 of the simpsons. As a certain podcaster that won’t be named said because I have, a lot of bones to pick with them lol - there’s something so redundant and pointless about saying “everything that’s happening in this fictional show isn’t real”. what does it realistically.. add, kinda thing.

But I don’t think there’s cause to be automatically dismissive of anything that tries to.. approach children’s media from an angle where you can construct it as being just a little bit more sombre than it looks like on the surface or something? idk. because there can be worthwhile things to explore that make interesting commentary on the text, where you NEED to introduce less-than-happy concepts to derive them. (Sometimes the kind of commentary that deconstructions try to make is, not so good and misses the mark, although it’s not always the case.) there’s one argument against this which is like, Why can’t you just let kids have things? It’s not that deep. You’re trying to put a sinister spin on something when... it’s just not necessary. Why add to the darkness of the world. let people, especially kids, just have this bright and pure thing.

And I completely agree with that sentiment, honestly. The smurfs are good, happy, innocent, that’s the way they are and should be, don’t try to take that away from kids or people. Like 80%-90% of my enjoyment of the smurfs is all about that, I’m in full agreement, I just want happy little innocent elf society adventures and I’ll be happy. Although. It’s not like smurfs was always happy. there are plenty of tearjerker moments in the show, plenty of disasters and bad things happen to them (that they readily overcome by the end of the episode). and here I guess you also have to avoid patronising kids in thinking that only happy and nice stuff can be for them. as in, the smurfs does have really sad and upsetting moments but that Obviously doesn’t make it Not For Kids.

I think that in addition to that, slightly darker themes can be explored and exposed under certain extreme circumstances if smurf society was subject to it. And I think this in no way invalidates their tranquil, happy status quo and good nature as a society as we know it. Also it just so happens that my inspiration for fic happened to revolve around negative ideas instead of positive despite me, in fandom, just enjoying the positive/light-hearted usually (I think?). whoops. but these kinds of outside-of-canon things don’t do anything to the canon, canon stands as it is. I try my best to stick as close to canon as possible kind of, as a kind of canon purist, haha, in terms of characters and realistic reactions.

another thing is, for a positive kid show like smurfs, to have something really bad happen might seem off, but, one of the things I want(ed) to explore is “if x thing happened, how would the characters deal with it?” (I think this point will be, more pertinent to the next smurfs fic I have lined up once I finish the current one I’m working on. heh, heh, heh.)

I mean really bad stuff happened in the cartoon but it was never too extreme and it was resolved by the end of the episode normally. so for something long-term... yeah.

I also think occasionally I’ve done like. stupid smurf stuff that is kinda ooc over the years. and part of why is I think something happened where I was so anti-doing that that it kind of looped back around to the point where I Did it because, of course, I acknowledge how far-removed from canon it is that it therefore doesn’t mean anything, or something like that. and It Amused Me. and sometimes shock value smurfs at least done Somewhat tastefully is amusing to me too for that same reason because (if) it’s harmless fun or something

now this whole thing I’ve written up is mostly general thoughts and not actually much related to my fic. just, writing the fic has got me thinking about this kind of stuff so some of it is vaguely related. But fundamentally I don’t want my fic to be super dark. in fact, there are many very dark storyline paths that I could have taken which I actively chose not to, because those paths were not what I wanted this story to do. I just want it to be a fic where the smurfs experience a lot of hardship that they struggle to overcome, and I want to keep it very closely aligned to canon where I can, while other stuff changes, with.. time. Like yea there are definitely some dark elements though haha. But I’ve read some dark smurfs fic and haha.. don’t think mine really shapes up.

Like this whole post might sound like me being defensive or something, but it’s not because the premise of my fic isn’t “Edgy Grimdark Smurfs” or anything like that, and therefore that’s not a concept that I need to defend for my fic. and I don’t need to be on any kind of defense because nothing anyone else has said has prompted this post, haha. I didn’t set out to write Dark smurfs fic, I set out with an idea of some challenges the village could face and followed through with how I thought the village and its inhabitants would/could react to them, or some of the possible ways the village could react to them. And IF the results turn less-than-smurfy, I still follow up on them if I think it is realistic to the canon for it to happen and an interesting path to explore. Like I’m not really taking the world and adding/forcing dark elements in, I’m bringing out underlying currents that I already saw present when observing the society in the cartoon. Maybe I added some stuff to flesh things out, but the core ideas I bring out have basis in the cartoon imo. Anyway yeah like 70% of this post isn’t related to my fic, just kinda general thoughts type thing as I said lol.

Oh yeah also it’s like - I want my fic to still remain mostly in-tune with the show, I want to do my best with that. I don’t want darkness-induced apathy or for it to feel like it’s too far out of line from what is plausible. in-tune with the universe and the characters, but exploring stuff you wouldn’t necessarily pitch to young children at the same time type thing. And I’m not going out of my way to do that, moreso I’m not imposing that restriction on myself in terms of what I write. I’m tryin’ my best, haha. like, setting out to write grimdark fic is fine, but it possibly requires a different audience and authorial approach compared to what I feel is the approach I want to encourage for my fic. both approaches and writing styles are valid, just different type thing. I’d hate to turn people away if they’re not into grimdark stuff when it’s not what I was going for or w/e