#roscaposting

[rosquinn]

"mutuals can ask for discord" mutuals can haunt me after they die. mutuals can paint my immortal youth in a cursed portrait. mutuals can build a 8ft tall creature in my college dorm. mutuals can watch me wake up as a monstrous vermin. mutuals can feed me soup after i commit murder. mutuals can help me kill uncle claudius. mutuals can go out with me and my girlfriend from across the bay. mutuals can hunt the beast with me. do better

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Made this for a friend

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Finished the first ace attorney trilogy yesterday and made these to celebrate

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pentiment

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im seeing a lot of holden haters on the catcher in the rye tag again so id like to tap the sign

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she sent me her location bruh wtf is this

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i am obsessed with this panel of the Dracula manga for reasons i can't even begin to explain

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one of my favorite things about the great gatsby is that despite being the narrator nick gives himself the "background character" role and decides that none of the things that happened are his business. he's there the entire time, follows gatsby around and generally has a very detailed perspective of all the people involved in that mess. he knows who cheated on who and why, he knows who is unhappily married, etc. this being said his mission is to watch everything and then write it down gatsby running over a woman with a car and then getting shot to death has nothing to do with him and could have not been avoided

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lesbian flag colorpicked from a shot of rem from death note saying humans are disgusting creatures. happy pride month

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I really enjoy neurodivergent readings of classic literature because the whole "i have an obsession with being pure/great/always seen as morally good" "sometimes I get obsessed with an idea and believe I'm on the right path and don't act rationally" "i feel uneasy and incapable of enjoying things since [traumatic event(s)]" "I feel alienated from society and don't understand it at all" bunch of thoughts that are very present in most classics are almost always big symptoms of some kind of mental illness (which, in fact, does add a lot to the story) and I love to see people talk about them from that perspective instead of just "lol this guy is whiny and dumb"

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One of my Dorian Gray hot takes is that there was absolutely nothing in Dorian and Basil's relationship that was healthy. I keep seeing posts like "Basil's love for Dorian was so pure, that's why the portrait was so pretty and the real villain of the story is Wotton because he corrupted it"

As I see it, yes, Wotton did corrupt him, but saying Basil's feelings for Dorian were pure is simply inaccurate to the story. Basil says himself he merely sees Dorian as an artistic ideal [Dorian Gray is to me simply a motive in art. I find him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and subtleties of certain colours. That is all; ch1] and admitted he (a 10 year older man, who had power over him) tried to isolate him from other people and "keep him to himself". Furthermore, Basil also plays a big role in the way Dorian sees himself and his beauty, by painting him everyday and not maintaining any conversation with him, he's indirectly reaffirming what Wotton tells him: people only care about you because you're pretty and young. There is also this scene from the second chapter:

Dorian Gray turned and looked at him. "I believe you would, Basil. You like your art better than your friends. I am no more to you than a green bronze figure. Hardly as much, I dare say.

The painter stared in amazement. It was so unlike Dorian to speak like that. What had happened? He seemed quite angry. His face was flushed and his cheeksburning.

"Yes," he continued, "I am less to you than your ivory Hermes or your silver Faun. You will like them always. How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself."

Hallward turned pale and caught his hand. "Dorian! Dorian!" he cried, "don't talk like that. I have never had such a friend as you, and I shall never have suchanother. You are not jealous of material things, are you?-you who are finer than any of them!"

Dorian is even dealing with a suicidal ideation over what Wotton has told him and the way Basil sees him, he needs emotional validation, he's asking to be told there's more than him than that, and Basil's reaction is just─ no. You're prettier than any other object (indirectly comparing him to one, too).

Basil's view of Dorian influences how he sees people as much as Wotton's. For example, to Dorian Sybil was only what she pretended to be, he loved her performance, her acting, how she did exactly what the public wanted (which can apply to Dorian himself), not the real her. She was only an artistic ideal to him, she meant to him exactly what Dorian meant to Basil. He ignored her desires, pain and everything not related to what he wanted to see, since that's what he's been taught he must appreciate.

I also disagree with the interpretation of the portrait as a "pure" reflection of Basil's love (I would personally rather describe it as an obsession, though) and Dorians soul because it's not. At least not entirely. Part of the point of the book is that everyone only saw the part of Dorian they wanted: the portrait represents Basil's idolized version of him, what he wanted to see and how he refused to see Dorian as a person instead of an artistic ideal. That's why he tried to make him redeem himself, because he hated seeing his version of Dorian shatter into pieces. It was never Dorian entirely, not even after aging terribly because that's the result of Basil and Wotton's influence. The portrait was not his real soul, it was a modified version of it other people played with because nobody cared about the whole thing, and the influence was so big those parts became his whole being. It was just an idolized, molded version at first but turned into his real self with the time and the sins. Dorian's soul (the portrait) was constructed upon what others appreciated about him, so when Wotton motivated him to sin, because Dorian's potential to be terrible was what mattered to him, it became ugly and terrible. There was absolutely nothing pure about that portrait since day 1.

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i've re-read the catcher in the rye recently, and as holden is one of my favourite classic literature narrators i've tried to break down a couple parts of his way of talking that intrigue me. expect this to be a (quite disorganized) long post + warning for mentions of suicide, SA, death, everything that comes with the catcher in the rye.

holden's fame as a whiny narrator does surprise me even more now because he doesn't actually complain about anything bad that's happened to him. he projects anger and sadness onto small, trivial things, like movies, for example, and brushes off all of the traumatic events he's been through (the death of his brother, being assaulted by teachers, watching a classmate commit suicide, etc) and his suicidal thoughts. and when he does mention them, he changes the subject immediately:

this is the last paragraph of chapter 14. here, holden uses words such as "feeling like", "probably" and "if" to make suicidal ideation seem a lot less concerning than it is, referring to it as a momentary thought that doesn't have much importance and then looking for a excuse to stop talking about it. he doesn't explain it, he doesn't address it directly and avoids elaborating about it. given the many things he has to say about schools, religion, movies and all you'd think he'd be talkative about his own life and personal feelings, but it's something he tries to mention the least he can.

a significantly more "unserious" moment when he mentions suicide is the ending paragraph of chapter 18:

holden switches from talking about things he likes to suicidal ideation tied to an impossibility and an hyperbole to make it seem less serious, then immediately closes the chapter to not have to elaborate. he uses hyperboles a lot as well-- "i'm crazy about x", "that killed me", specially when talking about trivial matters. i feel like he (unconciously) does this to make the reader get used to his "disproportionate" reactions to things that aren't that serious, so him thinking about killing himself isn't something that specially catches their attention, and they can forget about it as quickly as he does.

moving on:

end of chapter 24, and once again, he uses slang even in moments when he feels threatened-- he doesn't switch to a more "serious" vocabulary (he even keeps the hyperboles!), he talks the exact same way to the reader when he's chatting with a woman at the bus stop as when he's described how he was sexually assaulted by his teachers as a child,

again, he avoids addressing the situation directly ("that kind of stuff", "something perverty") and immediately drives the attention to his own reaction to it, attributes it a cause he can't control and closes the sentence, without really explaining anything. it follows the same structure as the ch14 scene:

mention of a traumatic experience or a dangerous thought -> vague description of his reaction to it, without referring to his thoughts in depth -> correlation to something he can't do anything about as an explanation (sweating, people finding his body) -> chapter abruptly ends and the subject changes.

now, it should be added on to this that holden uses escapism quite often as a coping mechanism:

(↑ chapter 14, right before the paragraph about suicide)

(↑ start of chapter 20)

and the structure repeats! hyperboles, slang, blaming it on something he can't control (alcohol this time), then switching to another subject. talk about avoidance

another interesting thing i noticed is that he replicates some parts of the speech of people he's met: he says "certainly" quite often despite making fun of carl luce for talking like that. funny thing is, he imitates luce's vocabulary (which he related to luce wanting to show off and appear as mature) when he talks to his little sister phoebe:

he says it after saying sure, when there is no need to. it has a slightly mocking tone.

there's probably more things that are worth noticing, but these caught my attention the most

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my take on dorian gray. hi

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i'm currently reading make the exorcist fall in love and i fear this is one of the coolest interpretations of the deadly sins i've ever seen. it's actually fucking crazy

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kitten i'm gonna be honest, daddy has been consuming dangerous chemicals in order to alter his appearance and take a form in which repressing all the desires he gave up on in his teenage years isn't necessary anymore, and in consequence it is possible that he is on the brink of death due to constantly switching between two halves of his soul, if not at the verge of insanity