#lise's bitchy opinions about irrelevant and unimportant matters

[veliseraptor]

people at work mentioning that they're just gotten into fantasy after thinking it was bad and me getting hyped...only for them to mention acotar and fourth wing specifically

no that fantasy is bad

[veliseraptor]

once again petitioning for at least the temporary retirement of the word "problematic" in order to encourage more specific and precise language and force people to actually say what the issue is

"[x] is problematic because it depicts homophobia" okay but that doesn't actually tell me anything at all, try "[x] includes outdated stereotypes about gay people that go unquestioned/unchallenged by the narrative", more specific, more informative, less fucking obnoxious for me personally to read

[veliseraptor]

sometimes I think people think "narrative parallels" means "exactly the same" and like...that's not the point, actually, the point with narrative parallels is that they're variations on a theme that are meant to illuminate something about each variation. a narrative parallel that is just a precise reiteration of another thing isn't saying anything. it's just redundant.

[veliseraptor]

saw a book I was kind of interested in reading recced as “cozy.” never has a single word killed my interest in a book that dead

[veliseraptor]

re: that post i just reblogged about 'cozy horror'...i know better than to expect anything approaching decent commentary from the mary sue these days but this article really is just. sending me this morning. (thank you for sharing, @bereft-of-frogs! this was a good diversion from being angry about work stuff to being angry about something else.) starting off strong with:

local writer has been introduced to novel concept of broader horror genre!

ah yeah that instantly makes sense to me particularly as a segue after mentioning midsommar and the witch, two movies that i would definitely describe as "cozy"

the cozy horror novels of t. kingfisher, like the one with the description of an animated deer skull hovering outside a window at night that still freaks me out to remember? those ones?

my favorite part though might be the author's confident assertion that this is all about gender really:

because boys like icky bad horror that's difficult and intense and girls like nice cozy horror with happy endings and low stakes. ah yes. feminism!

if this becomes a thing i am going to perish. isn't taking over the sff environment with cozy feel good fluff enough, must the world take this from me too, it's hard enough to find horror i like already

[veliseraptor]

the thing is that i do firmly believe that people have a right to their interpretation of a text and to do as they please with it, i just also have a right to find their interpretation/what they choose to do with it really fucking annoying

[veliseraptor]

i think i should be legally allowed to bite people who post things that annoy me in character tags

[veliseraptor]

listen if your "found family" does not include revenge plots, murder, and suicide then honestly why should I care

[veliseraptor]

"i'm not an [x] apologist" fool. weakling

[veliseraptor]

i know memeposting is not where one sees incisive character analysis but sometimes. i still get annoyed about bad character analysis in memeposting

[veliseraptor]

Top five spiciest untamed opinions!

man, I've been in my own little corner of fandom for long enough that I feel like I struggle a little to parse what is spicy of my opinions and what isn't, but here's a go at it

The Untamed is a show with complex, morally grey characters that's telling a slightly different but not inherently inferior story. Maybe I'm just a bit defensive about this, and I have with time come to appreciate a lot of things about the novel over the way they play out in the show, but The Untamed was the first version of the story that I fell in love with and I think at least some of the criticisms of it overstate the degree to which it morally simplifies the story. I think, whether because of requirements of censorship or other reasons, that the moral messiness of the story is subtler, I don't think it's absent, and while Jin Guangyao in particular falls victim to a pretty intense villain edit the narrative still has plenty of sympathy for him (even if the audience, all too often, does not). I think it's telling a slightly different story (as others have discussed), but I think it's a strong adaptation that still works with the underlying themes of the text.

However, that being said, The lessening of Wei Wuxian's culpability, as in the introduction of the second flautist, weakens his character. I feel like the character of Wei Wuxian as we see him in The Untamed still has the recognizable flaws of the character from the novel - I think the degree to which they're sometimes claimed to be toned down is overstated, which I think I've written some about before. He's still at least a little arrogant, causes problems, has a definite temper, and doesn't always respect other peoples' choices, among other things. But what The Untamed does do is remove some of his culpability, or at least temper it - both for Jin Zixuan's death and the massacre at Nightless City, which are two moments that contribute to a strong tragic arc in the first life, which makes for a more powerful (imo) arc in the second life. Removing, or at least lessening, Wei Wuxian's culpability for Jin Zixuan's death and Jiang Yanli's death makes him more a victim of circumstance than of his own human flaws, and at least for me, a character who is doomed by their own flaws is a far more compelling one than one who just happens to fall victim to outside forces. It makes him, I would argue, more passive and less of an active force, and I think the culpability for those two deaths - and the loss of control that causes it - makes for a more powerful narrative than that of a man who is victimized by someone else's actions.

Jin Guangyao was a good Chief Cultivator. I see people talk about him as though he was corrupt and evil and just plotting all the time, but the Bad Things™ he does mostly happen before his tenure as Chief Cultivator and, even taking those into account, have a limited impact on the world at large (with the exception of Nie Mingjue's death, but even that I would argue has more personal repercussions than broader political ones). As far as his responsibility for the cultivation world at large, we have no evidence prior to his downfall that he is negatively perceived by people, except for the fact of his birth/origins.

this is more MDZS-related than Untamed specific, but: MXTX deserves praise for writing "problematic" and messy queer sex, but it's just not hot. I don't have a whole lot to add on this one, but one of my least favorite parts of some corners of The Untamed fandom are people who are thoroughgoing MXTX antis who are quick to cry about the ~problematic~ aspects of Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian's sex life (which, honestly, I think are overstated a lot of the time, as is the weirdness of the sex scenes); however, in my opinion, the sex scenes as they stand just aren't very sexy, and I don't think that's intentional (as it arguably is in SVSSS). The sex scenes may be a shortcoming in the text, perhaps, but not the one certain people think it is.

this is again a stronger argument in the novel but I think it's present in the show as well: Jin Guangyao and Wei Wuxian are "there but for the grace of god" foils, but not in the sense of Jin Guangyao being "Wei Wuxian if he made bad moral choices" but in the sense of "who Wei Wuxian could've been if his circumstances were different." I've definitely written about this before and how much it drives me nuts the way people treat narrative foils in this story in general as Goofus and Gallant style duos, but this is a specific one. I think Jin Guangyao is an example of a story that runs alongside Wei Wuxian's, but ends in a different place, and I think the story isn't saying that he ends in that place because of something inherently worse about Jin Guangyao, but because of the way his circumstances happen to diverge from Wei Wuxian's in specific key ways. In some ways his ending is even a near beat-for-beat rewrite of Wei Wuxian's death, and Wei Wuxian receives the grace of a second life not because of any inherent merit, but actually because of his bad reputation. I think this goes for Xue Yang, too, actually.

I absolutely know I'm forgetting things and there are probably things back in my bitchy opinions tag that I could dig out, but here's at least a few that came to mind.

[veliseraptor]

one of my lesser discussed grudges against the fandom police is the way in which they render interesting conversation in fandom borderline impossible due to the ripple effects of their rhetoric poisoning the ability to actually talk about characters in a complex way

[veliseraptor]

the most common tag for fics tagged fenris/anders on ao3 being "fluff"...couldn't be me

[veliseraptor]

funny how often incorrect quotes are not "incorrect" because they do not belong to the canon the characters are from but "incorrect" because they're just out of character

[veliseraptor]

going to go out on a limb and say that it's not in fact a condemnable offense for a character to react badly to awful traumatic experiences. sometimes upsetting things happen and characters get upset about them and I don't actually think that is a reason to point and laugh

controversial perhaps but I stand by it

[veliseraptor]

there are few things that inspire me more as a writer than reading something with the seed of a brilliant idea, executed badly