#not an allegory

[bill-y]

Is the arcana fandom still alive? I'm practically quaking in my boots wanting to publish a story about my half baked oc 😔☝️

[ratsonfire]

I never thought a Honda Odyssey could be so homoerotic

[consumebread]

[fogmoo]

Lamb to the slaughter

[joanofexys]

queer themes in x-men my beloved. Angel binding his wings. Bobby’s parents asking if he’s tried just not being a mutant. Nightcrawler and catholic guilt. The existence of cherik. Everything with Scott/Jean/Logan. Mystique and Destiny.

[coolxatu]

she allegoried on my cave til i [JOKE PENDING]

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

[taliabhattwrites]

[jupiter-suggestion]

consider the sperm whale and the squid. an ancient rivalry that dates back millions of years. we know the whales eat the squids. we know the squids do not make it easy for them. we know this because of the scars the whales carry, scars on the outside of their body, and on the inside as well. how badly must you want something to endure wounds inside your mouth? inside your gut?

consider the whale, who is harmed by what sustains her. consider the squid, whose flesh is soft and delicious but refuses to go down easy.

[icecreamwithjackdaniels]

Conradyn Cunaeus (Dutch, 1828–1895), "Allegorical Depiction of Loyalty and Love" (detail)

[the-evil-clergyman]

The Pole Star by Luis Ricardo Falero (1885)

[prokopetz]

Concept: survival-horror tabletop RPG set in one of those fleshy hell-worlds, except the Flesh Hell Planet is a. basically benevolent, but b. deeply incompetent. Like, it's not one of those "theoretically benevolent but thinks it knows what's good for you better than you do" or "trying to violently assimilate everything because it thinks that being made a part of itself is ontologically good" deals – it really does want to help its human inhabitants, and it's willing to do so on humanity's own terms. The trouble is that it doesn't really get humanity, its capacity for both receptive and expressive communication in ways that individual humans can understand is extremely limited, and also it's just plain not very good at a lot of things, to the extent that even when it does fully understand what's needed it often fucks it up in some bizarre way.

[camofag]

the public reaction to i saw the tv glow is like a perfect case study into how cis people take up queer spaces and unknowingly mock and enjoy trans suffering. sitting in the theater, i had a pit in my stomach the entire time. so many times, i would tear up and then someone else in the theater would laugh. and i wouldn’t cry because how would they look at me when the lights came back on? because they don’t see it. they don’t see the pain. they think it’s funny. i left the theater completely silent, not saying a word to my boyfriend and he didn’t say a word to me until partway into the drive home. the people around us immediately got to picking it apart, explaining what it all meant to each other, dumbing it down, making theories. cis people see the the movie, just like transness, as something to debate. a conversation. something to dissect because it makes them uncomfortable if they don’t understand it in their easily digestible way.

[escapistcatontheinternet]

i love the extras of dungeon meshi in how it fleshes out the world because they make it so much more evident how race affects every part of the story while avoiding the zootopia racism problem. like obv a main theme of the story is like, humanity and desire, 'to eat is to live', etc, but since the majority of it takes place in the dungeon isolated from society and thru the lens of laios, the racial aspects play out more like shadows on a wall for most of the story.

then in the extras we get comics like this

which at a glance fleshes out the racial aspects via a character explaining the racial rules of universe - humans have x amount of bones, while orcs and kobolds have more. however, if u take it less straightforwardly, it points out how the concept of 'human' is a constructed concept in the world. the fact that there are different categories of human in different parts of the world based off of what types of humanoids occur there is already a demonstration of this. in response, the bones explanation seems to kabru and the characters as an objective way of measuring humans vs nonhumans.

but obv, when the culture was deciding what humanoids were humans and nonhumans, they weren't blindly analyzing skeletons and then deciding. just visually, one can glean that orcs and kobolds look less like the ingroup of tallmen, elves, dwarves, gnomes, etc. the bones explanation appears as a justification for that immediate prejudice under a scientific guise - I'm sure that one could come up with the same number of physical differences between a gnome and an elf that they would find between a tallman and an orc. it sounds a lot better to say 'well, an orc has 230 bones while a human has 206' then 'well, an orc looks ewwww yucky yucky to me while a human looks normal'.

and what i like abt the comic is that the characters take the explanation at face value for the most part. when a contradiction is brought up in the oni, kabru can neatly slot them into the predetermined number of bones framework. bc that's kinda how it works irl - there r cultural prejudices that we can posthumously justify, and if we find something outside of it, we can twist it to fit into our predetermined binary. however, since the reader does not live in a world where there are orcs and kobolds to be prejudiced against, we can see that flaw in the cultural logic. when the party encounters the orcs, the number of bones has no bearing on their humanity. They r shown to be cliquish and distrusting of outsiders, but not any more than the elves are later in the story.

tldr dungeon meshi worldbuilding is so good

[lionofchaeronea]

Night and Her Daughter Sleep, Mary L. Macomber, 1902

[cy-lindric]

An angel. Alchemy treaty Aurora Consurgens, 1420-1450