#not on the grounds that it's correct

[elodieunderglass]

changes and trends in horror-genre films are linked to the anxieties of the culture in its time and place. Vampires are the manifestation of grappling with sexuality; aliens, of foreign influence. Horror from the Cold War is about apathy and annihilation; classic Japanese horror is characterised by “nature’s revenge”; psychological horror plays with anxieties that absorbed its audience, like pregnancy/abortion, mental illness, femininity. Some horror presses on the bruise of being trapped in a situation with upsetting tasks to complete, especially ones that compromise you as a person - reflecting the horrors and anxieties of capitalism etc etc etc. Cosmic horror is slightly out of fashion because our culture is more comfortable with, even wistful for, “the unknown.” Monster horror now has to be aware of itself, as a contingent of people now live in the freedom and comfort of saying “I would willingly, gladly, even preferentially fuck that monster.” But I don’t know much about films or genres: that ground has been covered by cleverer people.

I don’t actually like horror or movies. What interests me at the moment is how horror of the 2020s has an element of perception and paying attention.

Multiple movies in one year discussed monsters that killed you if you perceived them. There are monsters you can’t look at; monsters that kill you instantly if you get their attention. Monsters where you have to be silent, look down, hold still: pray that they pass over you. M Zombies have changed from a hand-waved virus that covers extras in splashy gore, to insidious spores. A disaster film is called Don’t Look Up, a horror film is called Nope. Even trashy nun horror sets up strange premises of keeping your eyes fixed on something as the devil GETS you.

No idea if this is anything. (I haven’t seen any of these things because, unfortunately, I hate them.) Someone who understands better than me could say something clever here, and I hope they do.

But the thing I’m thinking about is what this will look like to the future, as the Victorian sex vampires and Cold War anxieties look to us. I think they’ll have a little sympathy, but they probably won’t. You poor little prey animals, the kids will say, you were awfully afraid of facing up to things, weren’t you?

[forged-in-kaoss]

Episode 110 vs episode 1100

[whetstonefires]

The reason I keep banging the Jiang Fengmian drum so hard is not that he did nothing wrong--he's definitely in contention for best parenting in this book but that bar is in the ground--but because most of the takes I see about him are so extremely bad.

If you want to slag him off for trying to make choices that would hurt no one, and winding up properly protecting no one as a result, that's valid! That's an interesting and text-based critique, which opens into his parallels with Lan Xichen!

If you want to blame him for being weirdly over-invested in Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng being bffs, that's fair, that definitely contributed to the weirdness between them. If you want to say he was a poor communicator, that he fundamentally misunderstood his son, that he failed to be emotionally available in a way his kids could get much use out of, even that he should have figured out a way to stop Yu Ziyuan from creating such a hostile environment, all of that is fair game!

If you want to tackle how the worst thing he did to his kids was die I am so interested in how Wei Wuxian went on to abandon A-Yuan by going to his death, and how that might be tied to how his primary adult role model tied him to a boat and went off to a fight he knew he was going to lose.

After his parents had already left him like that once before, presumably less intentionally.

But no, instead I keep seeing that Jiang Fengmian didn't care. That he never expressed affection. That he actively participated in Yu Ziyuan's fucky game of forcing proxy conflict onto the boys instead of constantly trying (and failing) to shut it down, or that he ignored her bad behavior because it didn't affect him, or that he fought with her constantly, or that he was too much of an unmanly coward to stand up to her when she wanted something.

All of which are directly in contradiction to every scene he's in, and several of which manage to invert or erase the actual conflicts between him and his wife that were the source of all that tension.

And which are really interesting, because some of the most intractable elements are ideological--Yu Ziyuan is fundamentally a conservative and Jiang Fengmian seems to want to be an egalitarian, which ofc matched poorly with his hereditary authority as patriarch of a large sect.

The fact that the bit where we get to actually see him failing to parent Jiang Cheng consists of him gently and firmly trying to correct Jiang Cheng's ethics when what was actually needed in that moment was reassurance for the well-founded insecurities that were causing him to be a little bitch, only for Yu Ziyuan to charge in and make everything fifty times worse, is so much more interesting than literally any version of this family dynamic I have seen in fic. It's to the point I'm relieved when writers kill Jiang Fengmian off, because it means they probably won't feel the need to character-assassinate him too badly.

The number of people I've seen come right out and say some variation of 'men can't be abused' is killing me here. No, Yu Ziyuan wanting to hurt her husband does not constitute sufficient proof that he abused her first and deserved it! That's not how anything works!

[hawktims]

No. I wanna be with you. Sleep in the same bed with you all night. Not get kicked out at midnight so the neighbors won't see me leaving in the morning.

FELLOW TRAVELERS (2023) 1.03 | HIT ME

[serpentface]

What exactly are living gods in the blightseed universe?

Ok here's the (DANGEROUSLY vestigial at this point) Meta Deeplore:

There is a material form of energy that is utilized by biological bodies essentially as an animating force. This IS the vaguely defined, extremely ambiguous magic in the setting. It is what produces the actual experience of Consciousness and can be basically considered 1:1 with conscious experience. All life utilizes this energy (whether actually conscious life in the traditional sense or not).

It cannot be created or destroyed, and rather follows pathways of dispersal between one material plane and a parallel plane. This parallel plane is 'the ether' 'the dreamlands' etc, and has its own matter. Discrete entities from the dreamlands are essentially formed as a byproduct of consciousness and, when interacted with, are deeply susceptible to the influence of conscious Thought (they are essentially matter organized By consciousness and can be reorganized by consciousness)

These are the entities that can become living gods. Dreamlands fauna occasionally slips into prime material reality, at which point they are directly under the influence of consciousness and can be transformed. Dreamlands fauna in of itself is not directly perceivable but produces a sense of Presence, like the feeling of being watched when alone in the wilderness, a 'third man effect', a sense of inexplicable awe or fear, seeing shadows from the corner of your eye, etc. The combination of their tangible effects and their susceptibility to consciousness creates a self-reinforcing cycle that produces living gods.

IE: if one is on a forest and people experience the sensation of its presence, belief that there is some entity there may develop. This will follow the lines of the cultural worldview- say there are already beliefs in spectral hounds that encounter travelers at night, it might be interpreted as a location-specific hound, given a name and identity through stories. This in turn causes the dreamlands fauna to physically embody that form and the assumed qualities, and people will start having absolute materially real encounters with it, thus reinforcing the initial beliefs that created it and generating new elements of the mythology. This is what a living god is.

They need persistent, localized, and coherent beliefs to hold their forms. If a village creates a living god and is then wiped out in a disaster, the god will gradually lose its form and return to its initial state of a sense of Presence. This is also a limiting factor on the 'size' and power of a living god, if an entire religion formed around it and became a widespread phenomena, the living god itself cannot 'keep up'. It is sustained on direct and localized interactions, so belief becoming widely dispersed (especially if the localized belief is lost) will cause it to gradually become less discrete. The effect of this property is that living gods are almost always minor deities or spirits tied to a specific location by a specific nearby culture. A lot of deities in larger religions may have once had a living god component that is now indiscrete.

The living god of the Ur-tree is an unusual exception in that it was created over millennia, basically by the survival instincts of the Plants it interacts with, and has held its form over hundreds of millions of years due to this being ubiquitous and un-susceptible to cultural change. The only thing that could 'kill it' is if its forest was entirely destroyed.

So 99% of living gods can be described as thoughtforms created by the process of folkloric/religious development. They are created BY people and not the other way around, and nothing about their nature confirms or denies the existence of other deities or etc.

And yeah I'm going to be 100% real I am REALLY tempted to dump even this extremely ambiguous magical element like it is soooooooooooooooo fucking NOT important to the setting at this point. I've kind of allowed 'literal god entities created by mortal belief' to be just a tiny part of the world's fabric by their nature, like it works within the worldbuilding for such a hugely significant concept to ultimately be insignificant in the overall framework, so I COULD just Leave It but idk. If it were not for me wanting to still have my big fucking god tree and a talking dog as an actual character it would be out of here soooo fast..........

[brionysea]

I'm trying really hard not to just be The Complainer because that's an energy I don't want to bring here when I love (present tense; I rewatch it like 5 times a day) arcane season 1 so much but does anyone remember when powder was taken in by silco and being raised by this very utilitarian merciless 'the ends justify the means' type character made jinx turn out violent and merciless as well. and vi was horrified by her and the lanes were terrified of her and piltover was falling over itself trying to scapegoat her as the one bad apple of the undercity to kid themselves into believing that everyone else was perfectly fine with being treated as less than. and that contrasts vi after vander etc. died because she was raised by him and internalised the idea that no one wins in war and fighting back against systemic oppression isn't worth the damage it causes to your own community which is why she ended up working with cait and the council like vander worked with grayson. the people who raised them shaped them into who they are today but then in season 2 jinx has a daughter and she's suddenly completely normal and well adjusted and her attachment style isn't digging her nails in until she draws blood at all. like What. what happened. didn't things used to mean something

[abirddogmoment]

We took our steadiness training out into the wild last night!

[critter-creature-or-beast]

Submitted for classification by @egon17

[qoldenskies]

I know it’s normal to his character but there is something so sick and twisted about how in CC we see Leo using white lies to joke. It’s a one-off joke but these lines:

OH THEY DROVE ME INSANE. Leo is so good at acting and manipulating and gaslighting, and he uses his skill with it so gently with Donnie most of the time, especially because Donnie is worse than picking up on subtexts/takes people more at their word than most. Like—Leo is so careful about not leaving Donnie out of the joke, and in turn Donnie trusts Leo to make it so he can always tell when something is a lie. It’s like Leo has a blade and is gently tapping Donnie with the flat end to make him laugh, and Donnie doesn’t even twitch because Leo’s never so much as nicked him.

And then Leo tells him he’s crazy. He’s hysterical. He’s being weird. You’re making things up and losing your tools. Yeah you really were in the wrong “but thanks ilysm.” You were only in the closet for a few hours. God you’re terrible at taking a joke. Leo stabs him over and over again and Donnie doesn’t even realize it because Leo’s never so much as nicked him so Donnie doesn’t realize he was being cut into until it was killing him. Just. Oohhh Donnie trusted him entirely with his little heart and Leo squeezed until it stopped moving.

YES THIS!!!!!!! and then in ME leo chooses to lie to him again, even though it's something he's so guilty about doing because he was the main one responsible for the gaslighting (he was the ringleader of it all, something about how he already fell into a leadership position before it was even put on his shoulders being so apparent here, especially as someone who motivated/hyped the others up,,,,,) because he thinks he's out of options, that its the only thing he can do to make things a little better. he's perpetuating the cycle he's trying to break out of as a self-fulfilling prophecy; does the intent even really matter when its so clear the effect is going to be the same? was there any right answer?

even though its definitely a cognitive distortion created from the tragedy of what happened, maybe leo did have somewhat of a point when he said donnie trusted him too much. he laid out the means to his own undoing on a silver platter and refused to take it away even as he bled out on the floor; for such a complicated person, donnie makes his love so simple and unconditional, and that's fine, of course, as long as nobody goes out of their way to hurt him--- that's how the family's always functioned, hasn't it? as terrible as raph was under the effects of the curse, he was correct when he said that things only work in their family when everyone plays their part. its interesting how easy it is to push over one domino and let the rest fall, how fragile peace can be with just one slip-up, one mistake... it almost reminds me of something else that happened =)

[bogunicorn]

apparently my hottest fandom take is that i think it's Certified Loser Shit to go on tumblr and act like you're being discriminated against because of the race or whatever of your fantasy OC in a video game

the devs of (insert game here) don't "hate you" and take things away from "your people" because you can't be remotely normal about playing a catgirl or a dwarf or an elf or something

[pxme-granate]

[IMAGE ID: Illustration of Marina Cheery and Roshni Singh from Nevermoor. A brown train with gold accents takes up the entire frame. Marina is holding Roshni’s cheek and leaning out of the window on the train door to give her a kiss. Roshni is holding on to the handrail and leaning up to meet her. Fireblossom petals fly around them; they are pink, resembling cherry blossom petals. Marina is dressed in a pink head wrap and scarf, and a light pink leather jacket. Roshni wears red glasses, a red skirt and a white formal shirt. END ID]

[bulletbeak]

No listen

[dirtytransmasc]

I have this HC for spider that I need to get out of my skull.

he was a cuddly baby. like, you could hold him, snuggle, even nap with him all day without a single complaint. he soaked up any and all physical affection he could.

now this isn't to mistake him with a sleepy baby, no no, he was something much more dangerous; he was the type of baby that would trick you into holding him all day, basically hiding his energy,, until you go to put him to bed, and he's up and running loops around you for hours.

basically, he was the perfect cuddle buddy, but he was also a ticking time bomb, because its so hard to tell when he needed to be held and given down time/a nap (cause he was god awful if he was over tired), when he just going with being held, and when he just wanted to be held (against the better judgment of his sleep schedule).

[front-facing-pokemon]

[s0fter-sin]

wooimbouttamakeanameformyselfere