#not tagging the show. not that bold!

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

i know this could get me canceled, but i'm finally going to be brave and speak my truth, having watched the episode for like the zillionth time this morning:

every time izzy and hellkat maggie have their little exchange in "calypso's birthday", my mind traipses off on this elaborate daydream vision full of emoji hearts where i imagine them falling in love and just making really dry deadpan remarks at everything and judging everybody together and generally being the most delightful sardonic pirate couple in history, like they're the two heckling muppet guys at the theatre but on the high seas instead. (finally, a context in which izzy gets to be a muppet.)

[rambrandt-the-painter]

friendly reminder that i would think the fandom thing your tagging my character with is lame as hell

[crookedfivefingers]

3.13 | ᴛʜᴇ ʟᴀꜱᴛ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ʟᴏʀᴅꜱ

link to the post I accidentally wound up prattling endlessly about in the tags 💀

[vivitalks]

Last night I saw the Great Gatsby musical. Before I went, I reread the Great Gatsby book (for the first time since 11th grade!) to get a refresher on the source material and the original story. Having the book so fresh in my mind made seeing the musical really interesting, and now I am going to do something I never thought I'd do, which is post some lengthy meta about The Great Gatsby. If you haven't seen the musical, this post may still be interesting to read, but it does contain some mild spoilers, so I leave that up to you. If you also haven't read the book, godspeed lol.

There's a lot I could talk about here when it comes to the way the book was adapted for the stage. But there's one particular thing I want to zero in on in this post, and that's the "unreliable narrator" of it all.

In the book, Nick Carraway is our narrator. He's an unreliable narrator practically by default - the idea is that he's retelling events that occurred two years prior, from memory. But even knowing that Nick is probably not reporting all events and characters with complete accuracy, it's hard to know which parts exactly are wrong, or what might have happened in reality, because even though he's an unreliable narrator, he's still the only narrator and this is the only version of events we know. We're forced to take Nick as our surrogate and take him at his word. Until the musical.

(I wondered how the show was going to deal with the fact that the story of Great Gatsby is not only told by an unreliable narrator but also by an outside perspective - generally speaking the events of the Great Gatsby aren't happening to Nick, they're just kind of happening around him. Yet he's the voice of the story, so in that way he's central to it, and I was curious how they were going to balance that fact with the fact that Gatsby is functionally the main character.

I think they struck a really good balance in the end. Nick's beginning and ending lines, lifted verbatim from his book narration, frame him clearly as the anchor of the story - I think that's the best word for it; the audience jumps from scene to scene, many but not all of which contain Nick, but we know that Nick is always going to be where the action is, or that he will at least know about it. He may not be the main character, but he's an essential character. But I digress a little bit.)

The difference between the way the story is imparted to the audience in the book versus in the musical boils down to this: in the book, Nick "plays" every character, so all their dialogue and actions, their mannerisms and the way they're described and reported, it's all informed by the beliefs Nick holds about them. Whether he means to or not, his biases paint certain characters in certain lights, and because he is our eyes and ears to the story, we have no choice but to absorb those biases.

But in the musical, every character is literally played by a different actor. Nick can only speak for himself. Nick can only tell his own parts as they happened. He may be "telling" the story, but we're watching the story. We have the benefit of an unblemished perspective on things - we can watch the events the way they actually unfold, regardless of how Nick believes or remembers they went down.

This difference - between Nick as the narrator and Nick as merely his own voice - is crucial in how the musical develops each character, some of them fairly different from how Nick described them in the book. And there's one book-to-stage change - a fairly small one, all things considered - that, to me, illustrated this difference perfectly.

There's a line towards the end of the Gatsby book. Something Nick says in narration, after his final conversation with Tom Buchanan, talking about how Tom gave away Gatsby's name and location to George Wilson (which ultimately led to Gatsby's death). Nick writes:

"I couldn’t forgive him or like him, but I saw that what he had done was, to him, entirely justified. It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…"

When I read this line in the book, I couldn't help vehemently agreeing. Screw those rich assholes! Money does corrupt! Tom and Daisy ARE careless wealthy people! It was easy to side with Nick, not only because he was the only perspective on the situation that I had, but also because he said this in internal response to a conversation with Tom, who, I think we can all agree, is a major jackass and a deeply unsympathetic character.

But in the musical, this line is spoken aloud by Nick. And he says it to Daisy, in her house, as she's packing up to skip town after Gatsby's death. In fact, he doesn't just say it; he shouts it, visibly and audibly outraged at her audacity to lead Gatsby on, ghost him, skip his funeral, and then move away to avoid the fallout. Nick is angry and highly critical of Daisy. But because we're no longer confined to his shoes, we also get to see Daisy's reaction - not as Nick remembers it, but as Daisy actually reacts. And because of that, we're able to really see, and confirm, that "Daisy is rich and careless" is not the full story.

I have to credit Eva Noblezada for a phenomenal performance (duh). Daisy in this scene is emotional, grieving, and it's clear she has been trying to contain these feelings for the sake of her husband and her own sanity. She's remorseful, not that Gatsby is gone necessarily, but that she allowed herself to entertain the fantasy of running away with him, only for it to be torn from her. She is trying to make the best of her unavoidable reality. And then Nick tears her a new one, calling her careless, accusing her of destroying things and being too rich to care.

And as I watched that scene, I was no longer wholly on Nick's side. I understood that this situation was so much more complex than Nick's chastisement acknowledged. Sure, Daisy wasn't innocent, but she also wasn't the callous rich girl Nick made her out to be. She did love Gatsby. And she also had a whole life with Tom. She had a daughter. She was a woman in the 1920s! That's a kind of life sentence even wealth can't erase.

The way Daisy responded may not quite have landed with Nick (if we consider the kind of fun possibility that the musical is the events as they happened and the book is Nick retelling those events as he remembers them two years later, then clearly Nick's disdain for Daisy's actions overtook whatever sympathy he felt for her), but the musical gave Daisy the opportunity to appeal to us. The audience. Having this omniscient perspective of things allowed us to draw our own conclusions, and I found myself a lot more sympathetic towards Daisy when I could both see and hear how she responded to Nick's verbal castigation.

In the book, Nick is the narrator. In the musical, Nick is a narrator. But he's no longer the sole arbiter of the story. The audience got to make our own judgements on the events as we witnessed them. Every one of us was a Nick - beholden to our own biases, maybe, but at least not beholden to his.

[howtodisappearcompletelyand]

20/10 stars little guy

[quixotin]

sincerely asking the natla haters to tag their salt.

Beyond the fact you literally can just. Not engage with the remake. You are entitled to your own opinion, but don't force-feed your hate to the rest of us who actually want to enjoy it, please.

Most of us watching are tired millennials with soul-draining 9 to 5s who can barely make ends meet. Let. Us. Have. This.

[tryingonametaphor]

just watched this video on why the women of arcane feel like well rounded characters and i just kept going 🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

then i thought about mike’s monologue and how some people genuinely believe that was good writing for el’s arc

like, imagine elora dying and mel needing to hear jayce tell her that he loves her for her to help her friend. imagine thinking that’s a well written character arc for a woman.

if the entire nina plot was 1 step forward, that monolgue was 2 steps back for el’s character. in that moment, her love for her best friend who was dying in front of her should’ve always been enough. period.

this is why i’ll never accept that monologue as a solution to mlvn’s relationship problems. it was oddly placed, badly executed, and framed suspiciously. plus will had to push mike to do it as if all of this wasn’t insulting enough to el’s growth.

i’ll genuinely be disappointed with season 5 if they try to convince me that mike saying ily is what el needed to save max. i trust the writers to not do that because they’ve shown us that the women in ST don’t need men to save them. certainly not with a big cheesy love monologue.

el just has the misfortune of being in a loveless relationship that the audience seems to think is exactly what she deserves.

[voulezloux]

yall think dan and phil would be excited about this unit in duolingo

[missmungoe]

The ineffable and ever-mysterious Cover Anon, who's gifted me not one but five fic covers for Shanties, has done it again, with the most stunning cover for my recently completed Mnemosyne, this time by the brilliant Checheven.

I am beyond words. What an incredible gift after finishing this fic.

[heretolurkbutalasitstaken]

I was thinking about the Scooby Doo/Supernatural crossover.

Right, so we all know Velma's gay, that's the official, real, original Velma from the first show to the direct-to-DVD movies.

Now, let's assume ScoobyNatural, the Supernatural Series 13 episode where the Supernatural brothers, Sam and Dean, along with their fake John Constantine guy, Castiel (who apparently died and was brought back with no explanation just for the crossover) get put into Scooby Doo because of a ghost. This is the only episode of that show I have seen.

Anyway, let's assume they were put into real Scooby Doo, back in time somehow, instead of a fake ghost-made version of Scooby Doo like the in-universe rationalisation. The people making it wanted that to be the case. I agree.

So, let's assume the original episode still happened, then this time travel added them to the episode. It still works with the show, they time travel all the time in the comics, and despite differences to the original made by the ghost, Sam and Dean do make a point of making sure the Scooby gang are still as normal as can be for their future adventures.

Oh, during the episode there's even a subplot where one of the brothers, Dean, tries to get with Daphne. Except that doesn't work, of course. Because Fred. At the end of the episode, they do a twist, however. Velma kisses him as they leave. And if you're an expert at the subtle ways of heterosexual communications, Velma apparently likes him back? This was shown earlier in the episode too, from what I can tell.

Bit of a mad thought but why not do it? Dean does a remark, Velma apparently wants to keep in touch. However, one snaggle*, Velma is still gay. And I know what you're thinking. But mainline Velma is better than that. But if the ghost from Supernatural was affecting the original Scooby Gang, what if the ghost like temporarily degayed her to make Dean happy/put him off the scent and keep them mostly in-character? Or like made original Velma be heterosexual for that one episode? Ghostly comphet if you will. I don't know. Oh, fun fact, the Scooby Gang are all DC characters because of their Batman crossover in the New Scooby-Doo Movies, their second incarnation, making them too exist in every DC universe. Even New 52. I don't even want to know what happened to them there.

*(They may have fallen into the James Gunn Scooby Doo 2 Trap Zone with Velma but Shaggy being somewhat self-aware is consistent with the direct-to-DVD series, specifically the Batman: The Brave and The Bold crossover movie. Oh, speaking of that one, it makes sense that they existed in the show's universe the whole time but Bat-Mite just didn't want to mess with them.)

[radarchives]

[mushiemellows]

Another Day in the Sun

Chapter 1: Mechanical Precision

Rating: T

Summary:

Sometimes, days on the open sea tended to blend together. The Strawhats didn’t really seem to mind. No one’s noticed that they keep living the same day over and over again, but the machine keeps ticking.

((The crew gets stuck in a time loop. Franky and Robin need to play Matchmaker in order to try and break them out))

extra notes: I'm doing a bunch of writing warm ups out of a book I'm reading. I figured I'd use this new fic as a sort of practice space. I'm trying to keep things fun and casual, but there's a story here. It won't be nearly as long or detailed as my other stuff, but I'm having fun writing.

(tagged initially as Frobin and Zosan just bc that's what I'm setting up in these first chapters, but there will be a lot more.)

[lover-of-skellies]

There truly is nothing better than being hot/thirsty, taking a drink of cold water, and feeling the cold spread through your body as it goes down

[mitamicah]

Not me brainstorming ideas for my post op tattoo (context) like I'd contact the tattoo artist tomorrow and not in a 1,5 year or more

This was where my inspiration took me today I guess :'D

[violent138]

Hearing James Gunn refer to Damian as Bruce Wayne's "actual" son in some description video for Brave and the Bold was so irritating.

I'm sure the man meant it as a placeholder for "biological" but it just reminds me of incredibly irritating statements people have made about Bruce valuing his biological kid over his adopted ones.

[golden-stag]

I keep seeing Strive theme tierlists and I felt left out so I made an GGXXAC+R themed one

Here she is! I tried being meaner, but most of the songs ended up in S or A tier anyway-