#those quotes are literally my favorite i love love love TLTS

[suncklet]

I will give u million dollar to talk about ur oc universes please~

Omg for realsies...?

I've talked about MISC. the most so it's up first: MISC. is a universe set in a world where the 80's didn't go away but instead got more obnoxious with a slightly darker color pallet. Weird characters walk the streets and there's close to everything (except centaurs sorry). The plot centers around the 5 main characters accidentally uncovering a secret militia working to turn the city government against the citizens in order to completely take it over to begin a nation-wide takeover. Hijinks ensue including: -Kidnapping -Identity Theft -Regular Theft -Elder Abuse -There's an alien somewhere -Someone dies (temporarily) -Someone dies (permanently)

It's meant to be more of a comic, if I ever do anything with it, I've drawn comic pages for it but I'm not too thrilled about a lot of them so instead here's some of my favorite images from this universe:

The Leaves This Season is my largest and most complete universe, as I consider it to be my most developed! Inspired by old fairytales and folktales, the plot follows two young boys lead through the Deep Woods after being separated from both friend and limbs. Escorted by mysterious fae housed in innocuous objects, they uncover what is causing the delay between seasons. The story is actually separated into 2 perspectives! : Bucky and Clawfoot are the duo of the youngest child who cannot walk after losing his legs to the monster that separated him from his friend, and a "blackwell" with a porcelain white clawfoot tub for a shell who acts as his transportation. Darcy and Cuppy are the duo of the eldest child who lost his arm during the event, and a blackwell who lends him a hand on their travels. They meet a number of characters before confronting Mother Nature and Father Time themselves before reuniting. It's a story with dark themes though very little actual depicted violence. This is probably my favorite universe due to the comfy yet contemplative tone it has. I put a ton of parallels and (though unintended) allegories within the writing, plot, and the characters themselves. I could talk about it for days-- But instead I'll share some actual quotes from the very real chapters I have written!

Also, it has a spotify playlist! I may have fucked up the number last time i mentioned it but the spotify playlist is 8 hours long. so yeah this is all ur getting for now feel free to put another coin in the slot for more.

[ducktracy]

HI just a quick followup on my last ask: I wholly agree with you!! I think the Bugs and Daffy shorts are good objectively (not my favorites, though, I’m biased towards the 40’s rabbit and duck as well) but I think after the run of Looney Tunes ended Daffy kind of got more and more portrayed as purely Bugs’s foil and still an unrepentant jerk even when not paired up with Bugs. It makes him feel like a Character With One Joke, and you see it all the time in post-Golden Age stuff.

As iconic as TLTS is, it’s a really bad example of this, making Daffy a callous jerk with no regard for anyone else and such a moronic failure that it’s a surprise he had the brains to hatch out of his egg.

And I think you CAN make Daffy a bit of an egocentric jerk and still have him be funny! Birth of a Notion (which PREDATES Rabbit Fire, for those who think his negative traits were birthed from it) is one of my favorite shorts and Daffy is lazy, deceptive, trigger-happy, but is still so chummy and charming that you can’t help but love him. For an even more brutal example, The Ducksters has Daffy be completely callous, but he still manages to be likable enough that you can still feel bad for him when the cartoon ends, because he’s just having so much fun the whole time. MORBID fun, he ABSOLUTELY gets what he deserves at the end, but fun nonetheless!

But when you have decades and decades of content after where Daffy’s only schtick is being ‘the angry and greedy one who always loses’, you lose the magic to his character. His charm. The reason Bugs and Daffy works in the first place, even!

I do not remember where I was going with this. But it’s something!

HONESTLY, the “Daffy as an unrepentant jerk” thing is something the actual golden age cartoons fall victim to! if you REALLY want to depress yourself, i invite you to watch the Speedy and Daffy cartoons. they actually helped me come to turn with Chuck Jones’ Duck and be less bitey towards him—there’s a difference between ego and lack of impulse control and just plain hatred. which, as you mentioned, have been some of his innate characteristics WAY further beyond Rabbit Fire. even some of the earliest Daffy shorts where he’s not all there yet. You Ought to Be in Pictures has been often propped up as a very apt example, but even as far back as 1939 in Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur, he paints a self portrait and says “not bad for a guy that never took a lesson in his life!”—the ego is there from day one! this may seem unremarkable, but that sort of self awareness is a genuinely groundbreaking development next to the Daffy cartoons Clampett was making at the same time, where Daffy genuinely seems to be locked in the throes of insanity and isn’t even half cognizant to his actual reality. and even in THOSE cartoons, he has an ego (he’s a general in Scalp Trouble! he’s a DICTATOR in What Price Porky!)

whereas in the Speedy and Daffy cartoons, you have plot lines that explicitly have characters saying “yeah Daffy hates poor people” (“how many times have i told you not to starve on my property” is a real quote from that short) or stories such as Daffy and Speedy are trapped on a deserted island and Daffy refuses to share any of the food with Speedy who barely asks for anything and has done LITERALLY NOTHING? i think Daffy even says something along the lines of “you can’t even speak English well” or something and it’s just like. jesus

BUT, i bring all that up because i think that is often conflated for what people understand Daffy to be. i do think some of Jones’ cartoons are guilty of Daffy becoming a bit one more—Ali-Baba Bunny is a great cartoon, but does feature a much more transparent “MINE MINE MINE” duck. and i again understand the transparency is half of the joke, but many adaptations take that transparency at face value. likewise, i’ve mentioned it many times before, but the Bugs and Daffy cartoons are written explicitly with Daffy in mind. he is the unequivocal star. in some of them, Bugs is just a means to an end, something to act off of and bounce off of. and as Daffy slowly grows more one dimensional over time, Bugs’ own passiveness doesn’t work as well—there isn’t enough given by Daffy to warrant that sidestepping. there needs to be more support. otherwise, Daffy is boiled down to his barest essentials, and those barest essentials are misconstrued and that’s how you end up with cartoons such as The Iceman Ducketh where Daffy IS HUNTING BUGS WITH A GUN! WITH AN ACTUAL INTENT TO KILL!!!!!! which wasn’t even his intent in the hunting trilogy with all his egging on Elmer. guns aren’t as big of a threat in those cartoons—the damage is temporary and comedic. Iceman Ducketh, Daffy is an actual, considerable threat and just seems like a complete misinterpretation of not only what makes the Bugs and Daffy dynamic click, but Daffy as a character.

I APPRECIATE YOUR THOUGHTS VERY MUCH ANON!! i echo the same sentiments. it seems so funny to say this over a cartoon duck who most people remember for funny catchphrases and drawings (as they should, but maybe ties back to what we’re talking about), but he genuinely is such a complex character and one of the most varied, and that i think prompts a lot of nuances to be missed OR misinterpreted. there’s a way to keep his greedy, bitter, egotistical tendencies in line and still have him be likable and charming. His Bitter Half is one of my favorites and a cartoon that i’d wage as one of the funniest Daffy shorts around, and he’s a complete jerk in that one!! the short starts with him acknowledging and saying he’s just marrying a woman for her money!!! who calls a kid “cute like a stomach pump”?? but, likewise, who even THINKS TO SAY “cute like a stomach pump”? that sort of specific little “quirk” is something that is so lacking in his aforementioned appearances of transparency.

HAHA sorry it took me so long to get around to this, but thank you for giving me a chance to blab about the duck some more!

[harrowing-of-hell]

it is 4am and i have consumed alcohol and i'm having tlt thoughts but they will probably not be coherent and this will be a very stream of consciousness post you have been warned

ok so to be very honest i was baffled that people read griddlehark as like, explicitly romantic whenever i first was browsing the tlt tag

like they were very obvs homoerotic and like i will directly quote tazmuir here and say there were "elements of a love story there" but i was not getting the same vibes that apparently everyone else was??

and maybe this is the difference between reading GTN in 2019 and then having to wait a year for HTN, because to me that allows a lot of time for your mind to sit and think on things and speculate

meanwhile i read GTN and HTN back to back. from my notes i finished GTN sept 14, 2022 (and i started reading it like, at MOST a week before that) and then i started HTN on sept 22 and finished it four days later (rip to people who say HTN was hard to read couldn't have been me. saw that it was in second person and nutted on the spot literally my favorite POV. guess im just built different. anyways)

so like, very obviously little down time between reading those 2 books so not a lot of time to really sit and think on it given that this is TLT we're talking about

but even now having read NTN and it now being a full year later since starting the series i still... don't get it

rather, i do not get it trying to read their relationship from the way that most people in the fandom seem to be reading it.

the pool scene and like, the drastic shift that it caused in harrow and gideon's relationship made very little sense to me and seemed kinda out of nowhere until i started thinking about it in this way; harrow and gideon do not love each other for who the other person is but rather what that person might mean for them.

to me gideon is vrry obviously someone who craves purpose after being treated like shit and generally just viewed as someone as disposable. so it makes sense to me that her goal was to escape the ninth and go join the cohort (so she can go be disposable but With Purpose).

but when they got to Canaan house....

bro cytherea groomed her SO FUCKING HARD. it's actually kinda fucking funny in a fucked up way because cytherea was like "noo gideon don't let anyone treat u like this" while gideon was getting her life force succed out of her but LITERALLY every one of cytherea's interactions with gideon just... reinforced and instilled the idea of cavalierhood in gideon

so much so that by the end of GTN gideon was like "no harrow YOU'RE the one who doesn't understand what a necro and cav are supposed to mean to each other." brainwashed. absolutely brainwashed.

ofc being surrounded by other necro/cav pairs who were Properly fulfilling their social roles influenced her as well, but cytherea had such a big part to play in it.

so naturally gideon's Search For Purpose shifts from being disposable-but-with-purpose in the cohort to being disposable-but-with-purpose as a cavalier.

so for gideon a relationship with harrow as her cavalier might mean a chance at having a Purpose, and this is why gideon loves her

meanwhile for harrow... the girl is 200 dead children and has been suicidal about that shit from day one. so here is one of the children that was supposed to die for her, but didn't, and fought her every single day of their lives, and it's this child that's offering her forgiveness???? like bro ofc she's gonna take that it's literally the salvation she's been looking for that even God, as we learn in HTN, can't offer her.

so naturally when the answer to lyctorhood is "ok now kill her and vore her soul <3" harrow would be like FUCK no. harrow has only now really beginning to think of gideon as a person and not a slave, as someone who is OF the Ninth house and not just beholden to it. so whyy would she ever kill her at this point.

and we KNOW this means so much to harrow because, thinking she's on the brink of death, she just straight up asks gideon if she's really forgiven her.

this is why i think they love each other and also i think this adds up with where they are now in the series. their reasons for loving the other person are completely at odds!!! so even with their now "Repaired" relationship it is still hopelessly fractured!!!

and tbh i do think griddlehark at this point is more, but not at all completely, one-sided than most people think because like, i think (or at least i hope??) harrowhark is slowly snapping out of this line of thinking and is realizing that's Not a healthy way to view gideon (idk i may be wrong) while gideon is DOUBLING DOWN SO HARD on being a cavalier. like that is her Purpose now it is her Identity!!! she needs to be someone's cavalier, and if she can't be harrow's then she'll try to be her father's.

not a fucking word out of her mouth when alecto kisses harrow but when alecto pledges herself to harrow?? she called the soul of the earth A SLUT!! absolutely insane.

anyways that's it that's all i had to say. i hope harrow and alecto fuck nasty in ATN <3

im not tagging this as anything tlt related but this will prob still some how show up in tags anyways because tumblr is stupid and broken

[andromerot]

said this and immediatly had to put my thoughts into words. i am half asleep and i havent checked this but i needed to talk about this so be ready for spoilers for both :) ueagh

tonight specifically im thinking about why season three of mabel is my favorite, and i think that its not only those all those fucking monologues and grief and despair and 22 of it all, but also its the first time mabel is given full agency of her story. episodes seven and fifteen serve mainly to anna's story, to understand mabel more clearly right before anna goes into the hill once, and then forever. to understand what it is anna is yearning for at the beggining of season two and why she does what she does at the end of it. in season three mabel is still played in relation to anna, because they are intextricable from one another, but we hear from her for real, about how she sees herself, how she feels, how she interacts with the world. i always say eternal return is my favorite episode, and its also the episode where i fell in love with the show, because its twenty minutes of mabel being angry and fierce and standing up for herself and even apologising at one point and telling anna that she loves her and killing for her.

so this is where tlt comes in for me, because mabel and anna can't be together in the same world (as a result of anna's curse, "i'll never see her, i'll never know her, not in this world.") this part of the podcast often gets confusing for a lot of people, including me, but what i do understand is that it's the reason why the first three seasons have them constantly switching places until they finally...coalesce in episode twenty four. i was thinking about it and i think season three parallels the last act of harrow the ninth, when gideon wakes up in harrows body, regaining a fraction of her agency, but with no harrow to be found. like, i don't think it's THAT much of a reach to say that harrow and gideon's inability to share a space mirror the same inability of mabel and anna, despite them being for very different reasons (opposite, maybe: gideon's sacrifice drove her apart from harrow forever, and anna's made it possible for her to break the curse.)

i think it's interesting to parallel the house to harrow's body, too? the martin house has been compared to a body a LOT, and there's some very fun implication that it is specifically a part of anna's body. even if it isn't literal (i think the figurative and literal lose meaning and importance in mabel), its undeniable that it's an extension of anna's influence. in season three, mabel feels uncomfortable and out of place, and she feels angry about that. i think it's episode eighteen where she says something like "i am standing now in my great grandmother's garden, in my grandmother's garden, in my mother's garden. yours now, i guess," or something to that tune, right? she calls herself a trespasser, with an ironic angst to it (later she tells the doppelganger that SHE is trespassing in HER garden - but that's for another day.) gideon, too, feels trapped and invasive in harrow's body, which of course has other undertones in the context of their relationship. and hey, this now is absolutely a stretch, but can't mabel killing baby veratrine and banishing her from anna's land be compared to gideon refusing ianthe for harrow (as in she's into bones?)

ok yeah, that IS a stretch, but hey. these four girls are insane and so beloved to me. i think tomorrow i'll go fishing for quotes to show what i mean. tell me your thoughts on this if you have any?

in theory comparing the locked tomb and mabel against each other as if they share anything more than some common themes and more importantly being enjoyed by me is a little silly and unproductive. however. i am making them kiss like barbie dolls