#tuned in for comedy purposes

[crusheswhimsandfancies]

Don’t stop me falling, it’s destiny calling!

This is the moment it all happened😭🫠😍

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: Parasocial Relationship

Parasocial Interaction (PSI) - semblance of interpersonal exchange whereby members of an audience come to feel that they personally know a performer they have encountered in mass media.

Parasocial Relationship (PSR) - generally defined as a relationship in which one member of the relationship isn’t aware of the other—e.g., a fan loves a celebrity, but the celebrity doesn’t know they exist. Not restricted to celebrities, PSRs also exist between people and fictional characters, whether portrayed by an actor or not.

PSRs tend to occur because of our natural tendency to link to others.

PSIs are thought to have a psychological effect similar to that of face-to-face communication.

Over time, PSIs with a performer may lead audience members to develop a parasocial relationship—a one-sided sense of connection with the performer.

The first examinations of parasocial relationships came in the 1950s, when psychologists tried to understand how television viewers reacted to the hosts, MCs, and TV personalities speaking to them directly out of the screen—a novel concept at the time.

It caused concern that viewers at home wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the relationships they had with a television personality and ones they had with “real” people— “victim[s] of the 'magic mirror'” as Richard Horton and Donald Wohl described in the 1956 paper.

The term parasocial interaction first appeared in the writings of American sociologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in the 1956 article “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” The article describes how PSIs may gradually lead to the formation of a parasocial relationship.

Most theoretical work attempting to define and differentiate PSIs and parasocial relationships was published in the latter half of the 20th century.

Generally, modern sociologists and media theorists agree that the concepts are distinct but deeply related.

The Parasocial Interaction Scale, devised in the 1980s in order to better quantify PSIs and parasocial relationships, asks subjects to answer questions about both phenomena.

PSIs occur when audience members feel that they are actively interacting with a mass media personality.

Human brains appear to process PSIs in much the same way as real-life interpersonal interactions because of the novelty of technologically mediated encounters.

While people do recognize the artificiality of the media apparatus, their perception of PSIs causes a real psychological reaction.

PSIs are strongest when a media personality cultivates the illusion of interpersonal intimacy.

Certain genres, programs, and celebrities have purposely fostered such a sense of intimacy in their tone and setting.

For example, TV talk shows have their hosts directly address the camera as if in conversation with each viewer, creating the illusion of face-to-face closeness.

Situation comedies manufacture familial settings that viewers grow more and more accustomed to.

Certain podcasts and radio shows—especially those crafted around one or more hosts—adopt an informal tone resembling that of a gathering of friends.

As PSIs become increasingly frequent, many audience members enter into a parasocial relationship built on comfort, satisfaction, and commitment.

In contrast, Horton and Wohl posited, people whose encounters with mass media figures are infrequent may feel detached and even cynical when they do encounter those figures.

Indeed, the researchers suggested, audience members must tune in regularly and of their own volition for the relationship to become parasocial.

Such relationships bridge genre and style. In one key study, researchers found that commitment levels (measured on a scale used for interpersonal relationships) for viewers of both fictional and nonfictional television programs were predicted by how invested the viewers were.

Consequently, when a program went off the air, committed viewers experienced higher levels of distress, dubbed a “parasocial breakup,” than uncommitted viewers.

Audience members often have a parasocial relationship with the same celebrity without feeling jealous of one another; in fact, in many cases, sharing their dedication to a mass media persona brings people closer together.

While parasocial relationships can enrich your life, these one-sided affairs can also hurt you.

They won't love you back. "They're like fake food. They taste good, but they have no nutritional content and won't meet your needs. You need to love and be loved in return to thrive," social scientist and professor Arthur C. Brooks says.

They might contribute to loneliness and isolation if you rely on them too much. Loneliness and isolation are linked to increased risks of many chronic health problems such as depression, anxiety, dementia, and heart disease, and even premature death.

They might have a negative influence on you. Are you picking up unhealthy ideas from the people you follow? Brooks says this should be a special concern for parents whose kids have parasocial relationships: The messages kids glean might be at odds with your values — perhaps because they are controversial political or adult themes.

Two red alerts:

Ask yourself if you're too attached. For example, are you skipping dinner with friends because you prefer watching a TV show with a character you care about and want to connect with?

Be wary. "If someone is trying to brainwash you, saying, 'I'm your friend, you can trust me,' that person is using a personal social bond to get you to do something — like vote a certain way," Brooks says. He points out that social media stars try to establish parasocial relationships with followers to get more clicks and make money. "That's what the new economy is all about — monetizing parasocial relationships on a mass scale," Brooks says.

A PSR that starts with healthy boundaries, can turn sour when a mob mentality forms, resulting in harassment.

PSRs are natural and not inherently unhealthy.

But, as Stever says, “Anything that can be true about a regular social relationship can be true about a parasocial relationship. Are they positive? Can they be good for us? Absolutely. Can they be negative? Can they be toxic for us? We all know examples of that.”

Sources: 1 2 3 4 ⚜ More: References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

[neuroticbookworm]

Engagement of QL Fandom in Indian Queer Media

I was tagged by @lurkingshan and invited to respond to an ask she received from @impala124 that noted the absence of India in the Asian queer media spaces and discussions, and questioned the reasons behind it. @starryalpacasstuff has also responded to it in a great post (check out the reblog additions for a treasure trove of Indian queer media recs), discussing, among many things, Korea’s culture export aiding their queer media ventures, access to Indian queer media, and the quality of Indian queer media. @twig-tea’s addition discussed the ease of access of Thai BLs via YouTube and how it prompted Korea and Japan to re-enter the genre.

My thoughts on Indian queer media are complicated and involve several detours to understand Indian media culture, its economic power, and how it navigates international viewership. For context, I am an Indian cinephile who grew up watching a wide variety of Indian media in terms of both language and genre. I naturally transitioned into watching Western content as globalization of the 2010s brought HBO and Comedy Central to Indian screens, and later sought out queer media, Asian media and Asian queer media on the internet.

Indian Media Industry - A Primer

I know there are a lot of countries right now that produce QL media, so I am gonna mainly consider Thailand, Japan, and Korea, the three countries most prolific with ql, for the purpose of this discussion. All of these countries, while regionally diverse, have managed to considerably homogenize in language and culture over the course of history and colonization. India, on the other hand, is still significantly and distinctly diverse in language, culture, religion, food, media styles, social norms, and on and on. India has 22 official languages and thousands of regional ones that are used in various capacities everyday. This diversity is then reflected in the media produced by India, with multiple powerhouse film industries dominating box offices simultaneously. Bollywood is the biggest one and obviously well known internationally, but Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Punjabi, Bengali-language film industries are successful in their own right and consistently produce box office hits and self-sustain in the larger Indian media landscape. This makes domestic media highly regional in India. Even today, in the age of social media, it takes a box office success to the tune of hundreds of millions of rupees for a film to break out of its domestic audience and cross over into other Indian states.

This diversity has also led to the different industries developing media styles unique to them. I watched this video a while ago of a creator documenting his experience of dipping toes into Indian Cinema for the first time, and he ends up covering three movies from three different industries, because the pathos of each of them is so fundamentally different yet effective in their own ways. This diversity also applies to the television industry, both traditional cable TV soaps, and the modern shows made for streaming sites. And all of this, *waves hands*, presents a set of challenges like no other country faces for both Indian queer creators and Indian queer media audiences.

The Challenges for Creators

Since the Indian media industry is not a big monolith and is made up of multiple film industries, queer creators who are trying to get their foot in the door will face a unique uphill battle in whichever regional industry they’re trying to break into. And trying to research, learn, and understand each and every single one of them will take me and my non-existent research team years, so the simpler thing to do would be listing the factors that have worked for other countries to foster their media industries to produce QL content, and discuss if India could replicate them. The list goes like this:

Japan’s rich history in yaoi

Thailand’s use of BL as a soft power to promote tourism

Korea’s culture export via kpop and other media

While India does have religious mythology that discusses sex, gender and queerness, it is often subtext with a lot of intersectionality. Does Ardhanarishvara represent fluid gender, or a symbol of harmony, or both? The debates are endless. Japan’s yaoi roots are as deep as they are explicit. And this rich history could be why the Japanese domestic audience is open to queer media even when the country is still conservative.

Thailand’s rise as a major player in the QL industry is remarkable, but there is a case to be made that the country’s media industry was directly and indirectly boosted by the government’s interest in establishing revenue from tourism, and exporting culture to international audiences via food and media. While the revenue from tourism in India is substantial, the Indian economy is not built on it. And the Indian media industry is thriving and regularly makes bank with their already established content models, so the producers have a pretty low incentive to deviate and fund queer media.

I bet every coin I own that not a single one of us on this hellsite have successfully eluded the allure of Korean media in our lives. The Korean media industry is a well-calibrated machine that shall and will target every single human into funneling their time, attention and money into the Korean culture and economy. And I think queer creators looking to make queer content in Korea would’ve had good incubation in an industry that was looking to make as much content as possible. And once again, while Indian movies have significant international box office collections, that is not where the Indian media industry, and just India in general, makes its money. The priorities are just not the same. And to be perfectly honest, India is nowhere near the level of Korea at producing and exporting television shows to international audiences.

All of this is a long winded way of saying that the conditions required to foster a QL industry in India are not the same as what we have seen work so far from the other major players. And sadly no one has really figured out the winning formula yet.

These are just a few reasons, and I haven’t even discussed nepotism and how painful class mobility is in India, making it even harder for new queer creators to break into the industry. There’s a reason why movies with queer representation like Badhaai Do, Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, and Kapoor & Sons all feature characters in the upper middle class or above. Hell, they’re even played by actors whose portfolio is already filled with daring and experimental roles, or by first- or second-gen nepo babies who would literally have nothing to lose from the potential backlash for playing a queer character. Poor, queer characters in Indian media have never been a part of a fluffy romance as far as I know. They are reserved for the gritty dramas where intersectionality of queerness, poverty, class and caste could be examined.

The Challenges for the Audience

And once again, all of this, *aggressively waves hands*, makes things harder for even the domestic audience to engage with Indian queer media, let alone international audiences. Kathaal - The Core, a 2023 Malayalam movie about a queer man in his fifties coming out of the closet and contesting in his village body elections, was a box office success in Kerala, and I can tell y’all with complete certainty that not many people outside of Kerala would’ve even heard of it. And this was not some small indie venture – in fact, the lead characters were played by Mammootty and Jyothika, who are both absolute legends in their own right in the South Indian film industry.

Super Deluxe was a 2019 Tamil-language black comedy film that tells four interwoven stories that run in parallel, and one of the stories is about a trans woman who, pre-transition, was married and had a son. She returns to her family as her post-transition self after years of disappearance, and the film engages in conversation around sex and gender, through the innocent questions of her young son. The movie is gorgeously made, and outrageously sharp and witty in its commentary on society’s views on sex, morality, religion and family. And once again, I don’t think it is well-known outside of the domestic and international award-circuit audiences it was promoted to (last I checked, it was available to domestic audiences on Netflix).

Sometimes, even the domestic audience might miss the queer representation in their regional media when it is indie enough to not get aggressively promoted. The Hindi-language anthology movie from Netflix, Ajeeb Daastaans (2021), featured a story where two women from different caste and social class meet at the workplace (the sapphic story, Geeli Pucchi, starts at 1:17:05, if anyone wants to check it out). It served biting commentary on the intersectionality of queerness, misogyny, caste and class. And once again, I’ve never found a person with whom I could discuss it with (other than my mom, with whom I watched it).

And sometimes, even when a massive show with queer representation is well promoted and well received by critics, it still manages to fly under the radar in Indian queer fandom spaces. Amazon Prime India spent a lot of coin on the show Made in Heaven (2019) – and it was worth it. The show follows the lives of two wedding planners, Tara and Karan. Karan is closeted (except to his close friends) for most of the show, but after he makes some powerful enemies in his line of work, he gets publicly outed, which puts him on the path of dealing with his family’s shades of acceptance, queer rights activism, and reconciling with an old friend. The car scene in episode 9 made me cry, and yet I’ve never read a word about this show from Indian QL fan blogs here on Tumblr.

Following every film and TV show that releases in one language, across all modes and platforms, and keeping an eye out for queer representation is hard enough. Doing it in multiple languages is downright impossible. And then personal preferences come into play. Personally, I enjoy nearly all genres of media, but I am primarily an angst monster, so I seek out and watch sad shit on the regular. All four examples I’ve listed in this section are good queer representations, but they are deeply sad, rage-inducing, heartbreaking and realistic. If one wanted to watch an Indian queer romance that’s inside the bubble, I’m not sure if they can even find one – I have certainly not come across any. Even the queer Bollywood movies designed for a box office run, paying homage to iconic Bollywood romance sequences, were still outside the bubble. When a niche audience like the QL fandom collides with a complex media-churning machine like the Indian media industry that is fundamentally not designed to cater to them, all we get is a lot of puzzled looks and question marks.

A Thought Experiment On The Future Of Indian QLs

Now that I have established the challenges, I want to engage in a little thought experiment – if we were to receive a steady stream of Indian QL content, what would it look like, and how can the fandom engage with it?

If we are looking for content from a stable production entity for Indian queer media, like Thailand’s GMMTV, Japan’s MBS Drama Shower, and Korea’s Strongberry, we would be waiting for a long time, at the very least a decade or two. What we could get are small indie queer shows like Romil and Jugal, squirreled away in a streaming platform exclusive to India and only accessible internationally via VPN. Another example is the list of sapphic shows @twig-tea shared with us a while ago, here. These are gonna be low budget, probably-not-great-quality shows reminiscent of early GMMTV.

Another variety of QL content we could get are the Bollywood queer romance films and TV shows. They will be cheesy and tropey and romantic, and might interact with the bubble, but probably mostly from the safety of an upper middle class setting. This means they would eventually run out of fresh perspectives they could tune into in their limited scope and the stories might turn stale and repetitive (I’m deriving this from the general state of things in the Indian media landscape over the last couple years). International access might be a little easier than the previous case, but not as easy as going to YouTube and hitting play.

The third and final variety are the gritty dramas with heavy social, cultural, religious, gender and class commentary that Indian cinema industry has always made, and has upgraded in the recent years to include queerness. Once again, the access will be hard, but if we are looking for queer stories that also show the audience what it is like being queer in India, beyond the glitz, the glam and the colors of pre-packaged Indian experience often sold to the West, this is where we will find it. Most of it will be sad, but we are a sad bunch who constantly make sad shit, so it will be on brand for us.

And all of these different varieties of content are gonna need to be picked up and promoted by the Indian folks in the QL fandom who are tuned into these regional industries. India not being a cultural monolith that is easy to package and ship is precisely why we have all these beautiful and crazy and sometimes even contradictory styles of media that are offered for us to explore. And therefore, the fandom engagement on Indian QL content would also vastly differ from the fandom engagement for Japan, Thailand and Korea. A dedicated fandom captain might not emerge, but rather, a collective group of folks tuning into and promoting finds from their regional industries would be the way to go. In addition, if this content is not available in English, we would need fan subbers to provide translation expertise to even make it accessible, something we see often for Japanese media on Tumblr.

I know from observation that watching media in a different regional language could sometimes be as foreign to Indian audiences as watching media from other countries. The language, traditions, mannerisms, social mores and food would all be different from region to region, but I guess it would be a good litmus test to observe how well the fandom acclimates to a culture that is so eye-wateringly diverse and not as constantly promoted to them.

When I was texting @waitmyturtles discussing how we can approach answering this question (remember when this all started with a question, some two thousand-ish words ago? Yes, that question), at a point in our conversation I exclaimed "Ugh, everything in India is too complicated!" This long-ass post of mine is in no way the complete account of why things are the way they are in the Indian queer media landscape. But all I know for sure is that it’s not simple. And I really do not want anything related to India to be simple, because being unbearably frustrating and complicated is not a bug, but a feature of India. The road to Indian QLs is unique, but I will do my best to check the paths and share and recommend them to my friends whenever possible. And I invite my fellow Indian QL fans to do the same.

[comicaurora]

YOU WATCHED CENTAURWORLD?!

YOU USED IT AS AN EXAMPLE IN THE TROPE TALK!!!!

It is my favorite and I require to know your thoughts on it.

It's. Hm

So I think it absolutely accomplished what it set out to do, which means it is a successful work of art. But I think what it was aiming for didn't work for me?

In its efforts to play with centaurworld's ridiculousness versus the gritty nightmare of the "real world", it tonally undercuts almost all of its profound moments and then tries to get profound character moments out of squeeky-toy inflatable cartoon characters. Of the main cast, Horse and Wammawink are basically the only ones who get sufficient development to feel like real characters capable of carrying impactful moments, and the rest of the crew are basically walking punchlines - even speedrunning their respective Tragic Backstories doesn't do much to strengthen them, because in the present of the show they're fundamentally joke characters incapable of emotional subtlety. It kinda feels like if a Looney Tunes episode randomly dropped a flashback to baby Daffy Duck being moses'd into the bullrushes as if that mattered to how he functioned now. Plus, once we start jumping back to the Real World again, it turns out all those characters are also wacky in their own way - lots of very quippy dialogue and self-referential humor. Instead of Horse feeling broadly representative of her world's tone, she feels like the most serious character in the entire show - at least until season 2 where her dialogue starts being 50% fart jokes by volume.

Overall I think I loved what they set up in season 1, but not how they paid it off in season 2. There's the themes they establish in season 1 of how centaurworld has a cartoonifying effect on everyone who comes there, and the way this plays to Horse early on is full on cartoon body horror - a realistic horse slowly and inexorably transforming into a parody of itself. I thought that was a fascinating way to frame it, and it was nightmarish to contemplate! It comes to a really strong head in the Whaletaur Shaman episode when her friends seem to finally realize how much she's been struggling and suffering and how, despite it looking like a big joke to everyone, it's profoundly unfunny to her. But while she gets a nice emotional resolution at the end of that episode, the underlying horror is never addressed again. She still seems unhappy with her new cartoon body, but the transformations are from this point forward framed as uncomplicated positives that everybody thinks are funny.

It's purposefully blending comedy and horror together, but the execution feels like the disparate ingredients are hindering each other's effectiveness. The horror stuff rarely gets sufficient gravity and is just left as Hey Look Horrifying Implications, and the jokes are often undermined by all the seriousness left lying around. It's a flavor combination that doesn't work for me.

And then the stuff with the Deertaur and the Princess is incredibly interesting and profound and tragic, and I don't understand why it's happening in the same show as everything else?

Also, this is a minor nitpick, but the musical numbers were astounding in the first season but seemed to experience some sort of weird categorical downgrade in season 2. All the solid numbers were reprises from season 1.

Centaurworld was doing something very much on purpose, and I just don't think I got what that something was.

[divasire]

❦ ꗃ⋆࣪. Introduction.

hey diva dolls! It’s larra darling, your fav diva & your girlfriend’s fav diva!

here are some divalicious things about me!

❦ I’m a 18 year old, girly! my birthday is July 5th & I’m a cancer. ♋︎ #moonchild ☾ ⋆ ˚｡⋆

❦ I’m african american + nigerian 🇳🇬 & congolese! 🇨🇩

❦ pink, black, & gold are my favs! + I love shimmer & glitter!

❦ I loveee vanilla & fruity smells, smelling like a treat is my specialty!

❦ I’m also extremely introverted, my alone time is sacred to me.

❦ my favorite eras are the 50s-2016 for fashion, music, films, I’m obsessed!

❦ my spirit animals are definitely a fawn & then a leopard! I find myself having so much similarities to them personality wise & also look wise!

❦ hibiscus 🌺 & cherry blossoms are my fav flowers! 🌸

❦ I love peace signs ☮︎ music notes ♫ & swirls ꩜ they’re my ultimate fav!

❦ I’m a sucker for mythical creatures but my #1 would have to be vampires! #teamdamon #teamklaus & #teamedward

❦ I love physiological horror, mystery, romance, drama, & comedy films!!

❦ my music taste is so diverse, I love music to the core, some artists I’ve been listening to recently would have to be sade, kali uchis, a$ap rocky, rihanna, ciara, chief keef, sexy red, deftones, cocteau twins, childish gambino, whew chile… the list goes on.

now that we’ve handle the basics, let’s get to the juicy stuff!

❦ ꗃ⋆࣪. what inspired me to start this blog?

I love creating it’s been a passion since I was little & honestly, having so much free time, I feel like I have a purpose, to spread my word, & to inspire people! after reflecting I notice how im usually the therapist friend (which we know has it’s cons & pros) but it really made me want to help others, & also showcase my mindset! I’ve been like this since a kid, & as I get older, it embraces.

❦ ꗃ⋆࣪. what to expect?

I have so many ideas for this blog, you guys are going to be fed! I have so many different series I want to do, I want to keep it girly, & positive! so stay in tuned, diva dolls!

❦ ily! & I’m always so grateful for the support, you cuties have shown me!

that’s all for now!

- kisses from, diva.💋

[anxietycheesecake]

Piggybacking on one of your recent posts, they did worse than just give The Guide nothing to do and the MAGA speech, they turned her into a prop for the needs of male characters.

That was her entire purpose.

Offering insight about Nandor and his romance struggles and being a love interest for Nandor to underscore that if The Powers That Be wanted Nandor to be physically attracted to Guillermo and making intended, overt romantic statements, he would be acting towards him as he does The Guide, but he doesn't, so get your minds out of the gutter, their love is more profound than that.

Then because the Monster is horny, all of the vampires INCLUDING NADJA are completely okay with decapitating The Guide - A FELLOW SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS OLD VAMPIRE - with or without her consent, and attach it to a frankenbody to be the Monster's sex doll.

Lazslo literally sneaks up on her with an electric saw.

That was it. We never saw her actually working with Jerry, just blink and you miss it moments.

(Also please try to imagine Season 1-2 Nadja, who actually cared about other women who were being shat on enough to turn her into her baby vamp and take her under her wing reacting like this and tell me her character hasn't been assassinated and that this show didn't fly off the rails.)

Wow, never gave the Guide that much thought (mostly BECAUSE THE WRITERS DON'T EITHER) but now I'm so viscerally pissed about it. You're 100% right. I mean, don't quote me on this, but this show got so distasteful regarding women and minorities when SF (a woman of color, btw) became less involved and left. She was still around in season 4 but didn't even write an ep, and mind you, up until that point, her eps were the only ones where Nandor stated the possibility of the love of his life being a man, after being confirmed multisexual for a while.

Marwa should've been a guywife and this is the hill I'm dying on. You can't make a middle eastern man take a middle eastern woman's agency away and ultimately turn her into a white man. The implications are unfortunate to say the least. Like, they were smart enough to have Guillermo be a man even when making him a woman was considered too (can you imagine having a Latina as a mistreated servant to a middle eastern man? The way that would've offended everyone lmao). This is such a gross and easily avoidable oversight, YOU LITERALLY GAVE THE DUDE MALE SPOUSES

Also comparing a brown man to an orc AND NOT SUBVERTING IT in the subversive show (I was so sure they were going to reveal the orcs were actually super hot at the end, because that's what early seasons would do). Just the fat jokes last season and the obsession with making it clear again and again that Guillermo is not wanted sexually by anyone in the horny monster society. I know the fandom thinks everyone's all over him but I genuinely believe this is collective delusion (affectionate) or fanfic brain because I can't remember any of this being backed by canon aside from the Guide's crush (also ftm sexual harassment is funny, I guess). Please correct me if I'm wrong. They changed their tune so many times it's hard to keep track.

Like, not to be that friend that's too woke, but when you have a diverse cast (except for black folks smh, though I'm glad they never went there) you need to be a bit more careful and responsible with what you put in their mouths. Come on!

Went on a bit of a tangent, sorry. My heart breaks for Kristen. Good for that main cast paycheck, but imagine having your character become a regular just for it to... Not be a regular? And be disrespected every second it's around without a satisfying conclusion? They seemed to understand back in the day that seeing a character be exaggeratedly mistreated constantly is only funny for a while, but they forgot, both with her and Guillermo.

I never liked the Guide. I found her entertaining on her first appearances but thought she changed the general feel of the comedy a little too much. To be honest, I always found it hard to care about her and Nadja, because the writers themselves never seemed that interested in them. But this is so annoying and makes me want to write sapphic fixits lmao

[somekindofcontraption]

"Acceptable Violence" in OFMD Season 2: deconstructing violence within the context of the show's parameters

I've been doing a lot of thinking about violence and the second season of Our Flag Means Death. I've come to some conclusions that I would like to share, but I would like to preface my thoughts with a disclaimer or two:

I did not like the second season, for myriad reasons, some of which I will outline here. But I am not here to attack you if you liked the season. I am not here to make commentary on who you are as a person or your personal taste if you liked the season. My not liking the season does not mean you can't like the season. In short: my dislike of the season is not about you at all! Also, this is not an academic paper. Which doesn't mean I might not do that in the future, but for now this is just an assembly of analysis and thoughts. If you do not care to read analytical criticism of something you deeply enjoyed? I invited you to scroll onward. If you liked the second season but would like to hear some of the reasons why many, including myself, didn't - carry on! The rest is under the cut.

The first season of Our Flag Means Death dips its toes into the world of piracy by following the unfolding story of Stede Bonnet, the newly minted former aristocrat-turned-pirate who dreams of a new sort of piracy; a gentler, more polite means of pirating. Things, as they said, did not go according to plan. The first season does an excellent job of laying the complex groundwork for an in-world set of principles which tell us what sort of violence is "normal" or "acceptable" in the context of the show and what isn't. (Please assume from here on out that when I say acceptable and normal the "quotes" are implied, as I am not talking about what is acceptable and normal in real life.) It does this through narrative framing, by softening more intense instances of violence through comedy and by pushing it off-screen, and by establishing who is a good guy and who is Not. Unacceptable: Stede Bonnet getting beat on, tied up, and bullied by the Badmintons and their ilk as a child. He's soft and likes flowers! He's got a mean dad! No one likes bullies! It's framed as a negative, it's not super funny (the camera cuts to Stede's face both in the past and present looking distressed, and Stede is the hero, so this can be generally accepted as bad.) This leads us to: Acceptable: Badminton getting whacked over the head and falling on his own sword. This I would categorize as what people have been referring to as "looney tune violence." He was a bully! He's part of a colonial navy! He was being absolutely horrible to Stede! It's funny that Stede is so inept!

Stede feels guilty about it, it causes him trauma, but that trauma is treated, quite often, comedically (see Badminton's "ghost" taunting him, characters treatment of his breakdown, etc). The context clues for whether or not this is acceptable violence are baked right into the writing, too. Oluwande says - claiming that Stede killed Badminton on purpose would gain him the respect of his crew. This is violence that in-world is both acceptable, expected, and also respected for the captain of a pirate ship. (See also: Murdering and/or tying up the remaining British navy crew and putting them through the same thing Stede went through. It's framed as triumphant, Stede having been vindicated, the crew celebrating it as a victory.) Unacceptable: Stede's concept of "soft piracy" of course comes crashing down when his whimsical attempt to woo the Spanish navy is cut short by his getting gut-stabbed.

Stede and the crew are being framed as the heroes of the story and the Spaniards are framed as the bad guys; this setup is why this violence, while totally within the realms of something our crew would do, is categorized as unacceptable. It's also important to note, however, that while it could have been quite a bit more graphic and disturbing if shot differently, the swelling symphony, the comedic cuts of the Spaniards triumphantly getting their ass kicked, softens the blow. Other acceptable instances of violence: The snail fork - horrifying if you think about it, but the narrative softens the blow. The guy was just really racist, giving us a sense of vindictive pleasure, and the violence is all off-screen (we don't actually have to see someone getting skinned with a snail fork). The French ship - again, horrifying if you think too much about people trapped on a burning ship in the middle of the ocean. But, they had all just been huge racist shit-heads who had harmed our heroes. In the context of the narrative, it is framed as being justified. We also don't actually see anyone burning to death, and we get a very funny shot of Ed looking at Stede in awe, and Stede looking very please with himself, confirming in-narrative that this was okay. Other unacceptable instances of violence:

Karl the bird - Jack is framed as an antagonist; he comes between Ed and Stede, obstructing the narrative subplot. Buttons, and by extension Karl, are part of the crew, the heroes. When Karl dies Buttons is devastated, everyone looks uncomfortable, and it's the last straw for Stede to kick Jack off the ship. Plus, there's the an "innocent character" thing similar to Stede as a child getting bullied; Karl was an animal, with no defenses, who did nothing wrong.

Finally, of course, we arrive at the moment that Lucius is pushed from the ship. Unacceptable: By all accounts, pushing people from ships is probably not outside the realm of things that pirates Definitely Do. But here we have another great instance of framing heroes and bad guys. In this case, we have a hero (Ed), seemingly killing another hero (Lucius), who was not only just trying to help him, but was absolutely not expecting violence. We also have a "death" that happened off-screen. We don't see Lucius "drowning." Had Lucius actually died, I think this would have been horrifying. Narratively and thematically, it would not have fit into the spirit of the show, because you could no longer frame Ed as a hero. There would be no real way that I can see to meaningfully redeem him in the context of a comedy, even a "black comedy" (which I do not believe OFMD is). And genuinely, I don't know anyone who thought Lucius was actually dead, so while what Ed did was horrible and awful and needed to be atoned for, it wasn't Final. It wasn't Irredeemable. He didn't become a capital v Villain. The rules of the first season made sense to me. Everything that happened fit narratively, was thematically appropriate, and established a certain set of rules and conventions to follow. It gets dark, and it does push the envelope of what I could bear in a "romantic comedy." Ed cutting off Izzy's toe is tempered (cutting off his littlest toe with a comedically large pair of scissors) but feeding them to him is disturbing. Izzy was an antagonist, not a villain, so giving him treatment reserved for, say, the British navy characters, and doing so graphically and on-screen, was A Lot. This coming from me, who really, REALLY hated Izzy at this point in time. But I think there was an underlying sense of hope that things would improve, resolve, and move forward through character growth and narrative. Stede was coming back to make amends; maybe Ed would find his way back to normalcy, and they'd meet in the middle. It was expected that apologies would be made and Ed could come back from the unacceptable things he did to Lucius, to the Crew, and to Izzy especially. That there would be character and interpersonal growth for them.

Unfortunately, the second season is where the show's parameters around acceptable and unacceptable violence absolutely falls apart. It's never quite clear why something is acceptable vs not, and we never see the character and interpersonal growth "promised" by the narrative which would redeem the dark tonal shift and veer the story back towards comedy. In order for Ed to be redeemed, the violence being framed as unacceptable during his Kraken era could not be so unacceptable that it crosses the line into irredeemable. Ed could not cross the line in the minds of the audience from "hero" to "villain." But the first three episodes of the season... were dark. They crossed the line. It felt like a character assassination to me. Ed's abuse of the crew, the continued maiming of Izzy (who at this point is hurdling into a sympathetic character arc of growth and redemption,) the self-harm, the attempted murder-suicide of his crew... most of it was on-screen, not at all tempered by comedy, and brutal. It wasn't heroes vs villains, it was supposed hero causing extensive harm and trauma to other heroes. The writing in these episodes were narratively cohesive and well-paced. They were not, however, thematically appropriate to a romantic comedy. At this point in the season I still felt like it was building towards a breaking point where Ed would come back to himself, where character growth would be achieved, and amends would be made. I was willing to hold tight.

But it didn't work in terms of the story that was setup in season one. It would have taken an incredible amount of character growth to even begin to come back from that; but I trusted the narrative to deliver. However, the real problem is that this season tried to rewrite the in-show parameters of what constitutes acceptable violence in ways that are uncomfortable and contrary to reality in ways that I find harmful. (I will be clear, in reference to recent discourse, I do feel the head-butt was comedic. It was looney tunes violence, it was well within the context of a romantic comedy, and it worked for me tonally, even though it's obviously not appropriate in real life.) Ed's chair throwing in the context of a man who had spent three episodes inflicting increasingly terrible domestic violence on people who loved and cared for him, who stuck by him -- in the larger context of him doing all this just because he felt rejected by a romantic partner -- is presented as in-show acceptable violence. It's presented as falling within the parameters. Proof? We are expected to still like Ed, and root for Ed, and want Ed to get better, and cheer for the romantic pairing "getting back together," and everything else. He is still presented as a hero. Sure, the show is telling us that what Ed did in his Kraken era is bad; but not so Bad that we shouldn't forgive him for it when he has made no real move to make amends for what he did. Like the crew, and Izzy specifically, we are meant to simply... move forward. That line about "getting away with it" without consequences I thought was a commentary on how Ed would not get to do that, actually was just... what happened. The season also wants me to believe that in the in-show parameters that Ed would hurt absolutely anybody but DEFINITELY NOT Stede, because Stede is his ultra super special soul mate and he would never do him any harm. This is not how things work in real life, and it is not a disbelief I am willing to suspend uncritically. Do I believe Ed, in the context of the show, would hurt Stede? Nope. I think it's more likely Stede would hurt Ed than the other way around. But I don't like the message that this in-show parameter sends, about how violence, particularly DV, is inflicted. I don't like being told that there is a super special person that this person who has abused others won't hurt. It's a bad message, and bad writing, and bad in-show precedence to set.

I'm not going to say all this without mentioning the stereotypes surrounding men of color, particular Indigenous men, which paints them as abusers. These stereotypes have been mentioned in regards to people talking about Ed's abuse this season. It's important to examine and be critical of oneself as a white person, and look long and hard at these biases. I don't want to fall into the trap of racist biases, and I don't want it to go unmentioned. I have thought long and hard about this. I've done a lot of self-examination on the subject of Ed and abuse. It has brought me back to my point of character assassination; I think the show fell into those stereotypes itself. I think Ed's characterization this season was problematic, and a disservice to the character as laid out in season one, and that's a big part of my disappointment with this season. (I also have a lot of thoughts on how Stede's character, who has been handed an immense amount of power over Ed and his agency as a character, is also extremely problematic. I will get into that in another post; it needs its own. So I'm not here to say Stede himself is not a Problem because he absolutely is and I will shout it from the rooftops.) "But somekindofcontraption," you say! "Ed has trauma!" Yes. That is very true. And it certainly explains some things, but as in real life, it absolutely does not excuse them. Ed's narrative was all about the perpetuation of trauma, particularly generational trauma, with absolutely no criticism or breakage of this cycle in any meaningful or productive way. It set up the story and did no work to resolve it. Ed was simply fixed because he and Stede said I love you and kissed a few times. The romance's "resolution" was unearned and unsatisfying. Neither Stede nor Ed were held accountable for what they did.

Then there was Izzy, who spent the whole of his arc being redeemed, moving forward as a character. He was the only character, I would say, with any meaningful growth. He's also the only one whose story was explicitly about being queer and queer discovery, rather than queerness merely being and incidental part of it. He's the only one who shows any accountability. Right up until the point that he died, his story was the best-written out of all of them. Then he dies. Izzy's death, and the ways that tonally it does not fit into the narrative, is another post onto itself. For now, I'll leave you with all of these rambling thoughts, condensed down as best I could into this tumblr post. If you have any further thoughts, I would love to hear them in good faith. For now, I say, that it's okay to be disappointed. This story was so meaningful to so many, and to be so thoroughly let down is hard. Grief is grief. Take care out there, and be kind to yourself, and be kind to those that are grieving.

[atomosphericnonsense]

The thing is as a gay black man in popular music Lil Nas X was always going to get hate and vitriol from conservatives, he’s just leaned into it for the sake of marketing and comedy, which is truly the only thing he could do if wanted to somehow get something out of the inevitable. When he sang “a sign of the times every time that I speak” in masterpiece track Call Me By Your Name, he was truly speaking the truth. Because when Old Town Road came out there was controversy, a whole big controversy about whether or not the song was country! It wasn’t on purpose it just happened because Lil Nas X is black!! The whole 7 era he was just releasing amazing music, with inspired videos that had vivid and captivating visuals! He tried minding his own business, and people could not handle him existing! So he decided to be hilarious, while and I cannot emphasize this enough, also delivering truly beautiful and thought provoking art! The J CHRIST video is fucking hysterical, this whole build up of “I’m escaping the industry and becoming a Christian” only to then release the Crucifixion mech suit was just like watching a loony tune train crash, you know what’s coming and you know that it will be backed with a slide whistle. And this is very clearly the perfect leading single, “is he up to something, only I know,” Lil Nas X continues to execute the flawless strategy of pissing off people who will already be pissed off anyway while continuing his rise to Supreme Pop Emperor. Anyone thinking this Strategy is overdone seems to be functioning under the delusion that the conservatives obsessed with lil nas x would react in any other way if Nas decided to drop the biblical concepts from his videos and music.

Anywho looking forward to the next release and currently only listening to J CHRIST <3

[chronological-knight]

Like A Weighted Blanket

Fandom: Hermitcraft

Word count: 669

Content warnings: Character losing time (it's played for comedy and caused by Magic Reasons, but I figured I should warn just in case)

Misc: Truth be told I've had this written for months by this point and just never bothered to post it, but I like it and figured hey why not! Plus all my other fics are between 5 and 75% percent done and I really just wanna post something already. Might put it on ao3 later who knows.

][][][][][

“And it just keeps happening! I keep losing time when I’m in this place, I come in for half an hour and when I go back out again it's feakin’ 3 AM! I can’t be awake at 3 AM! I have a reputation to uphold!”

Joe looks around the place critically while Bdubs is talking: It’s a small, beautifully decorated cottage with Bdubs' signature building style written all over it. The walls are an expertly crafted gradient including everything from andesite to dead coral, the furniture is neat but detailed, and it all has a wonderful character and atmosphere to it.

It is also, most definitely, a Temporal Zone.

The weight of Time usually lays heavy on Joe's shoulders, like a familiar weighted blanket wrapped around him. It’s a comforting constant in his life, reminding him that no matter what he or anyone else does, Time still goes on. Stepping into this house is like tripping on a sharp stone and hearing the blanket tear, right down the middle. It’s still there, of course — you can never really escape Time — but now the weight is distributed unevenly, and it hangs half on and half off your back, dragging on the floor collecting dirt. It’s unnerving. It’s uncomfortable.

He tunes back into the world and realises that Bdubs is still talking. “—I went to X about it cause I thought, well it's a problem with the code right? so he can fix it! But he told me to see you for some reason so— Here! Fix it so I can sleep again!”

Joe does another spin around the room, just for good measure, and asks, “How long since you spoke to X about it?”

Bdubs grunts in that way he does when he's being overdramatica on purpose. “For me or for you?”

“Either.”

“Well for YOU it's been about a week, but for ME it happened two hours ago.”

Joe nods along, only half paying attention to what Bdubs is saying. In truth, he already knows what's happened; it's hard not to feel the frayed edges of Time against his mind. He knows what he has to do, so he goes towards where the tear is widest — near a window by happenstance — and sits down on the floor in one quick motion.

As Joe starts rummaging through his inventory, Bdubs keeps talking.

“What are you gonna do about it, anyway? I didn't think you were any good with code.”

“Oh, I don't touch that stuff. It clashes with my nature.”

Ignoring Bdubs’ confused stare, Joe pulls a needle and thread out from the fabric between space, carefully avoiding the fabric between Time as he does so. Best to not get those two mixed up, in his experience.

Bdubs is apparently still having trouble grasping the situation, because his eyes get somehow even wider and he asks, “What the heck, are you sewing?! The fabric of spacetime is warping around my house and you’re sewing?!”

“Fabric of Time,” Joe says.

“Huh?”

“The fabric of Time is warping around your house, no space. And actually, it's always warping around everything. What's happening now is more like the fabric of Time is tearing around your house in particular. It's very uncomfortable.”

Joe takes the threaded needle and closes his eyes, reaching, this time, for the fabric between Time. He feels around until he catches the edge of the tear, and then holds firm.

“You might want to leave for this bit, by the way. It gets a little weird.”

With his eyes closed, Joe can't see Bdubs' expression. But he can hear the exasperation in his voice regardless.

“You know what, sure! Fine! I'll see you in half an hour, and that half an hour better actually be half an hour this time, and— and not five minutes, or a month, or, or yesterday! Got it?”

And with that, Bdubs stomps out of his house, grumbling all the way down the hill.

Joe chuckles fondly, pierces through the fabric of Time, and pulls.

[ww2yaoi]

I finished you'll be sor-reeeeeee by sid phillips. unorganized and unsolicited thoughts under the cut:

overall, I really enjoyed this book. like I had a ball on this bitch. I knew it was going to be a more light-hearted take on the war memoir but I didn’t realize how often I’d be cracking up at every ridiculous situation sid had gotten himself into. like it was laugh-out-loud, eyes watering kind of cracking up in a few instances. I guess the book just really hit on my kind of sense of humour, which is self-deprecating and attracted to the ridiculousness of the entire situation and also the unfortunate circumstances of it all. I would say the book was similar to parachute infantry in that way, the screwball, loony tunes vibe and accompanying cast of characters with various quirks (but don’t get me wrong, besides that they’re very different books).

obviously, it was nothing mind-blowing, but I don’t think it was the book’s intention to impress or make some sweeping statement. I think it accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is compile sid’s more humorous memories of the war. he calls it a book of “sea stories,” which to me communicates the kind of thing your grandpa might tell you if you asked him what he did during the war. sid initially wrote this book with the sole purpose of sharing his experiences with his family, so it makes sense that the book has a more casual, simple, straight-forward tone, and sid doesn’t really ruminate too much on one thing or the other or try to make much sense of it all. occasionally, he’ll make an observation that’s poignant, but then he’s basically just like that’s weird! and moves on. his attitude is not so melancholic. he’s not a leckie or a webster or a sledge. I would say this book reminded me more of babe and bill’s book, but I enjoyed this one a lot more than that one. sorry bill and babe </3

anyways, that’s not to say the book feels overly sanitized. there are a few instances where sid leaves things to the imagination or the swears are censored and the more inappropriate remarks from sid’s fellow marines aren’t disclosed, but you do get the sense that the war sucked complete ass. the conditions were awful and the marines were really, really, really, really hard work, especially being a lowly private like sid was during the whole war. I really enjoyed how this book highlighted some of the back-breaking physical labour sid had to do either in boot camp or on the troop ship or on the line or in their rest camp in the mess, etc. but you can see sid very much had a go-getter spirit and the power of youth on his side. that’s how he managed to survive. sid’s attitude towards this in retrospect is basically like yeah it was awful but it made me more resilient and now when bad things happen I can be like “I’ve seen way worse.” and I guess that’s really all you can hope for when you’ve been through something like that.

like I said the book does focus on the humour but there are moments of horror as well. sid seeing dead bodies, recounting the deaths of his comrades, hearing rumours of the japanese mutilating the allied dead, the intense bombings that made men sob like children and tremble and pray. he describes how disgusting their living situation was in the mud and the heat and the rain, how their bodies developed sores and their flesh rotted away, how they often didn’t have water or food, and when they did have food it was awful and they loathed it. he talks about how weak and emaciated some of the men got by the end of each campaign. and he was a teenager throughout all of this! it’s truly nuts

caoimhe/randlemartin pointed this out to me when I was sharing some excerpts with her but the humour and shenanigans shared in this book really highlight how young these marines were. like they were basically kids, and you can see that in how silly and rambunctious and funny and energetic their comedy and shenanigans are. and so very juvenile too… there’s stories of sid and his pals playing pranks on the higher-ups and running amuck in australia, and if anything, at least this time was one of freedom and excitement for these boys. for better or for worse. they got to leave their small towns and their families and got to see a corner of the world, meet people, and experience cultures they never would have had the war not happened.

a couple more things and I’ll shut up. something that comes up in the book a lot is the distinct bravado and macho attitude of the marines, which sid often highlights by repeating the phrase “no kind words. no sympathy ever.” he often talks about how mean and blasé his fellow marines would be in near-death situations, or gearing up for an invasion, or greeting someone coming back from the hospital, or really in unfortunate circumstances of any kind. no tender emotions or feelings here, folks! and sid doesn’t blatantly state this but you get the sense that it was a favoured coping mechanism of the men. and they used comedy to brush things aside so no one would linger too long on the raw human emotion of it all. because if you did you’d open up the wound and bleed out. that, I think, was the fear anyways. toxically masculine? perhaps!!!!! but I can see the value in suppressing those emotions in the moment to be able to get through the day without freaking the fuck out about how miserable your circumstances are. just laugh and move on. you have to do it or you’ll go nuts. that’s the impression I get and I think I would act similarly in that kind of situation.

what else… oh, the eugene of it all. eugene is mentioned a few times throughout the book but their relationship isn’t a key aspect of the story, so don’t go in expecting a sidsledge extravaganza. what is in the book though is very sweet and you can tell they meant a lot to each other wah :( sid even includes a quote from with the old breed in one chapter to better highlight the conditions on pavuvu and he says it’s a great book <3 he was definitely proud of eugene. get you a hype man like sid phillips

alright. closing remarks. I really enjoyed this. a lot more than I thought I would honestly. only place I would dock marks is in the very final chapter where sid goes on a bit of an old-man-yells-at-cloud rant and randomly says he doesn’t believe in evolution. that gave me whiplash, not because his views are surprising coming from an old white christian southern man born in the 1920s, but because it’s like what the hell does this have to do with anything the last 250 pages were about… I guess it really rounds out the having-a-conversation-with-your-grandpa experience. let’s get you to bed peepaw we don’t need to be discussing american christian values right now... so that was a bit bizarre. consequently, I wish the book had a more introspective conclusion, but I get the sense that sid isn’t that kind of guy. maybe that’s why he’s depicted as the repression king in the show. I think there’s a bit of reluctance in this book to look too hard at the difficult stuff, but if you want to study ww2 you have to consider the povs of people who feel that way and who try to focus on the bright side. even though it’s not as critically illuminating as the more hard-hitting memoirs, there’s obviously value in studying accounts like this because they reveal lesser explored aspects of the war, like how the troops used humour to cope. which I think is ultimately the thesis of the book

anyways I give it 4/5 stars <3 yay sid :D

[randomthefox]

The question is, how do I write to Amy? For her to be so cute yet so annoying?

Spose it depends, and at the end of the day it's very subjective. I think the balance is just right in Sonic Battle for example, but a lot of people think that that's a "bad" game for Amy. Even though she is objectively perfect in it. But the fact that you have to write the character as annoying on purpose is inherently going to mean that to some people she'll be TOO annoying and that'll spoil the whole dessert for them. Amy needs to be a perfect blend of sweet and tart, but some people are diabetic lol.

The other characters reactions towards Amy are key, in my opinion. Particularly Sonic, but the other characters are important too. I feel like this is the perfect encapsulation of the ideal reaction that they should be having towards Amy.

A literal translation is "well, it can't be helped" or something along those lines. Windii translated it into the second picture.

Either way I think that perfectly represents the ideal reaction to Amy's antics from the other characters. Nothing we can do about it, no choice but to either go along with it or get out of the way. In her own way she's a force of nature, carried away on her own flights of fancy and devoting herself to a lofty little ambition of her own invention. And she reacts very violently to anybody who challenges her whimsical fantasies.

I think the secret to getting the balance right is to remember that Amy is supposed to be a comedic character. Comedy is also subjective, so that too is going to land badly for some people. But for like 90% of the stories Amy is a part of, she's supposed to be really funny. But then at the end she can get serious. She's like an inside out joke. A regular joke is mostly a serious set up, so that the subversive punchline hits you with the comedy. But for Amy most of the set up is funny, but then she pulls out the emotionally impactful serious moment.

Like in Sonic Adventure 2, the entire joke of her involvement in the story is the boys keep running off and leaving her behind much to her chagrin. And to some people, they don't find that joke funny (even though it is objectively hilarious). But the whole thing works because then we get to the Last Story where Amy has been left behind again, but in being left behind she comes upon Shadow who isn't participating and that gives her the opportunity to emotionally connect with him and remind him of Maria's true final wish which convinces him to change his tune and help out.

She's a funny bitch, practically the butt of the joke, right up until she hammers you in the gut with the emotional highpoint of the entire story.

The best solution would be to make her cute AND annoying AT THE SAME TIME. This is why Sonic Battle is such a good Amy game. Her whole story in that game is she thinks Emerl is like her and Sonic's practice baby. So she goes ALL IN on being Emerl's mother, trying to take care of him but also impart proper social values and moral lessons onto him. Only this is an idea that she's completely invented out of nothing, and everyone else realizes that and none of them want to participate in it with her. Also Amy constantly fails to live up to her own ideals of motherhood.

THAT is peak Amy Rose right there. Absolutely perfect. She's being an annoying dumbass, but she's also ADORABLE. Trying to be Emerl's mom and smack proper manners (and formal Japanese speech etiquette) into him, only to immediately descend into vulgarity and violence when Phi interrupts her is HILARIOUS. Cute as a button, this stupid pink bitch. I just wanna pinch her little cheeks while she pouts and pulls out her hammer to bash my skull in.

Or you could just say fuck all of that and turn her into Sally Acorn I guess. Because that's "fixing" her.

Whatever works for you.

[chthonicgodling]

The Taki Fuego “BEST OF” Clip Show*~ the first half!

[next! first half • interlude1 • second half • interlude 2 • epilogue]

aka scenes from the past few months (prior to any chaos recently ensued): COMEDY HOUR

wWell!…… well well well. In the wake of our most recent turns of events aka the rise & resolution of quick text-only-tumblr-reveal-exclusive Elysium drama over the past few weeks - iykyk - instead of acknowledging any of THAT in my art, I thought it would be most appropriate to backtrack a bit instead first.

So The Taki Fuego Situation chugs along dutifully! Recap: Tory & Maci & Loki entangled into a psychosexual ridiculous trio that has only intensified as time has gone on. They (Tory, with Maci smirking over his shoulder) have gotten Loki pregnant and they’re all now expecting a baby! This kind of threeway nonsense is actually par for the course for Maci & Tory with all their friends but for sasssome reason this time feels different (TO ME, DELUSIONALLY). As in It’s not a throuple!!!! I have no intention of making a throuple!!! And yet…….

These little pieces are each bits of FULLY CANON CONVOS that have occupied my brain wholly through these past few months. Specifically, these lines all take place in the vague space of time between the baby announcement comic collection (and also this delicious thing), all the way up until…… (coughs) some recent chaos that I live-blogged through text posts (which I am NOT linking we’re in the past right now!!! SHH!!)

The main purpose of these drawings is reeeeally to serve as formal-informal-pseudo Elysium Drama Updates, as in, release of information & status updates canonized in ART, outside of my squealing essays! Like here specifically: deets about the mystery baby Loki is pregnant with????? iiiintetesting???

The secondary purpose though: as we know, I draw comics solely for expressions and dialogue. lol. and some of this dialogue was so. SO. fgkfkgkgkg oh my GGGGOD LMAO I JUST DESPERATELY WANTED TO SHARE IT????? they’re hSO FUCKING FUNNY I-

I did forget how to draw before I drew these hence the SKETCHINESS But I kinda dig it. And as always always always always, special gushing thanks to my better half the tumblr hiatus’d @fenixethekid for both gleefully enabling this nonsense with me and being responsible for Tory & all his dialogue (in orange). Maci is mine and you know what?? ELoki is mine too idc.

Next part incoming sooner rather than later: stay tuned👀

[fanaticsnail]

ARGHHH CURSE MY BRAIN FOR FORGETTING SO MANY THINGS (aka even more addition to my answers for the ask game. the ask game is now my reasons for ranting. please be careful of the length of this rant)

How the hell did I forget about Uta my beloved and X Drake my sweetie cop boy. AND KING. AND REIJU. ARJFKFHFKSJ-

• What song makes you think of your favourite character?

For Uta, literally every song on the Film Red album (personally, New Genesis, Backlight, and The World's Continuation really scream Uta to me). The songs really show how Uta progressed in the movie and it's just so fun to hear the tune change from a pop song to rock-style and to rap and then to ballad (that broke my heart). I first knew of Ado this way and boy did she have a really good voice (her growls omg).

On the topic of Ado, there's a really good song (also her debut song) called Usseewa that I think fits Law in the context of him expressing his dissatisfaction and anger towards Doflamingo. The catchphrase of the song is literally a very rude way to say shut up (usseewa), so- yeah.

And riding the bandwagon of "songs I know and ring with a particular character", Luffy with stupid by John Michael Howell (yes, again, I am just dumping songs that have a nice ring to them rn). This song is just my personal headcannon of how Luffy's stupidity mirrors a choice he made (unknowingly?) to preserve the brightness he has and to prevent himself from turning cynical like most of the world. After all, how can you see the good in the world and its people if you're constantly afraid of everything being everything it isn't?

SPOILER ALERT FOR KING'S ORIGINS/BACKSTORY AND X DRAKE'S IDENTITY

Moving on, I just got one for King (my dearest), Just A Man from Epic: The Musical (I have seen the book and it scares me and I have not touched it again since that moment). I know this is a bit turning the lyrics on its head but I feel like it'd fit him in a situation where he sees the Seraphims and he was reminded of his situation. He was a child when he had to witness the extermination of his people. He begins to think about how he's now Kaido's right-hand man and the people he's slain. He doesn't want the Seraphims who look just like his people to witness such violence and get corrupted at such a young age. I feel like deep down, King still wants to go back to a place he called home even when said home might not even be there anymore, but he's too busy trying not to get exposed and sold out to the World Government. The overall melody and lyrics just *slams table* it's just KING-

Back to a lighter mood, bc of a cinematic I saw on Tumblr (and then on Youtube) of Business Man by Tom Cardy with X Drake... yeah. It just sticks so bad I can't even keep a straight face anymore XD (pls watch it. I cannot explain the comedy magnificence in words alone) (cue drake singing i'm a business man with a business plan and apoo and hawkins watching with a look of disbelief)

Link: https://youtu.be/sg9CVmJQZ9o

OKAY SPOILER OVER

• What song makes you think of your OC?

I got a collection of them, but some that really stand out to me is Nobody by OneRepublic for Ainsley since he's Samantha's support pillar (he was the first Anomaly (what I call most of my OCs in this universe) that Samantha (albeit unknowingly at the time) created just for that purpose) which is why he's essentially the other half of her heart. He has been, is, will, and would always be with her as an everlasting companion/counterpart. Where Samantha is the more serious, stressed natural leader type, Ainsley is the laidback chaos in flesh type.

And then there's lovely by Billie Eilish and Khalid for Samantha. She's coping with her stress and borderline depression by becoming stoic and hardened (although still easily irritable sometimes (similar to Crocodile tbh)) and when I heard lovely my mind just went "yes that's her song, make her depresso espresso". Add the extra seasoning of something similar to savior complex and just being too responsible for things that she overworks herself (workaholic) because she got them standards.

There's also Royalty because DAYUM this fits her vibe so much. Like she isn't the grand flaunting bright kind of nobility but a "i rule over everything you know but you won't know about it until i tell you" royalty.

Last one for now (because I'm Indonesian and this is played real often in the radio rn), there's an Indonesian song called Gala bunga matahari by Sal Priadi that talks about accepting the passing of a loved one while living on happily as they hoped even though the singer still misses them. It really reminds me of Samantha just reminiscing on the people she they? loved who had already passed. The depresso espresso personality actually comes from Samantha being the first Anomaly created by the (mostly negative) subconcious of the entity right now dubbed as The Primordial One (yes all my Anomaly OCs are self-aware to some extent). The Primordial One of course has origins and that's where the remembering past friends part comes in. Tbh the OC universe is pretty much The Primordial One's subconcious that created a whole new universe and the lore goes deep here as well so I'll cut it right here (might pop up in your askbox with extra bits of lore tho).

• If your favourite character was real and appeared beside you, how would you feel about it? What would you do?

Honorable mentions because they're beloved (these exclude the intial shock reaction)

Uta: KARAOKES. BE FRIENDS WITH HER. SING ALONG. LISTEN TO HER MAJESTIC VOICE. I will teach her the music of this world and then go shopping. OH RIGHT JAMMING TO SONGS FOR HOURS JUST COOPED IN MY ROOM ASKSJKA- (as you can see i am not normal about her)

King (haven't i wrote this already? Anyway): 1. How did you fit into my house without breaking anything, 2. How the hell am I supposed to take you out with all these wings characteristics, 3. What kind of clothes would fit your tall ass

X Drake: so are you a cop - no i'm not - yes you are - of course not! - okay stop. I know you're a cop (shows him the video earlier clips of Wano, the Fandom, and all that) - ...okay then goddamnit - it's okay you're my lizard bbg - w h a t

Reiju: MMM SUGAR MOMMY. I'll save enough money so I can go to Japan and eat fugu (Japanese pufferfish) with her without big risks because have you seen how she saved Luffy from getting poisoned pre-WCI? Hell yeah. Aaand take her out for a shopping trip together and I'd really like to take her to a museum that focuses on biology and not just the appearances (like. museum/aquarium date. that's my mommy)

shiiiiiiiiittttt my rants might've gone out of control. Hugs and cookies for one of my favorite fanfic writers, bye- (i don't want to burden you pls don't feel pressured to answer this and hope i don't have anymore amnesiac sessions akrkrkj)

Now, you listen here. (Affectionately)

You can't just drop "Just a man" on me like that. Its so incredibly emotional, and I think of Gol D Roger every time. Just the:

"I look into your eyes, and think back to the son of mine... I'm just a man who's trying to go home... Deep down, I would trade the world to see my son and wife. I'm just a man."

Okay, now that I've said that. One Piece Red is gorgeous, and I love it so much. The music, the costume changes for the characters in that battle KOBY was just spectacular.

I love Samantha and Ainsley so much. I also adore the song 'Royalty', it's on almost every playlist. I HC that song with the monster trio. As a violinist, it sings to my soul. Samantha hitting it with the Billie Eilish just 🥺🥺🥺🥺. I adore her.

Also, X Drake and King 😭😭😭😭😭. The way you speak on them so passionately 🥹🥹🥹. I love it. I need to write for X Drake so bad. Also, agreed on Reiju. I can't wait to write for her in the next few weeks 🙌. Love her so much.

Thank you so much for your thoughts. I love them so much 🥹

[chronotsr]

No. 8 - B1, In Search of the Unknown (1979)

Author(s): Mike Carr Artist(s): David C. Sutherland III (Cover), David Trampier (Original Cover) Level range: 1, preferably party size 4+ players Theme: Tutorial Dungeon Major re-releases: Original Adventures Reincarnated: Into the Borderlands

A quirk of early DND that people sometimes forget is that you had to learn how to play this game. The assumption, prior to the Holmes Basic set being released in 1977, was that you knew a guy who knew how to play, in a kind of 1970s & Gary Gygax version of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Holmes had obviously made a big dent in this, but still there were complaints about the game being confusing and hard to learn. In steps Mike Carr who made the following bold proposal:

What if we made a paint-by-numbers DND module to train new GMs with?

In 2024 you might scoff at this, because it feels an awful lot like they just sold you half a module and told you to finish that. This is an unfair read, but this is a genuinely good habit to instill early into a GM. Too many times have I seen a new DM just, run books entirely stock and then be confused why it went badly. This breaks the back of that habit very, very early.

For those of you that remain unconvinced, in the OAR re-release of Into the Borderlands they included three stocked versions of B1 (I recommend Version A). But: keep in mind! You could not tune into Critical Role, there was not a DND club at every major school, and the discipline of TTRPG design itself did not exist yet. This was a stab at teaching DND entirely via text, so we will see in time how good a stab they took at it.

Oh, and before I exit the intro blurb, let's say it explicitly: this is the first standalone Basic Dungeons and Dragons module. It was a pack-in with the Holmes basic set (which means you got the Tower of Zenopus AND B1, a pretty tidy bargain), alongside some depressing little dice chits, a little blue rulebook, and a coupon for some dice that are bad-in-a-highly-charming way. We are spoiled for dice now, back then you had to ink your own in CRAYON.

ANYHOW, let's begin.

Firstly, Carr begins with explaining some broad principles to an aspiring new GM, like the concept of keying, minions, xp, difficulty, GM arts, et c. He also recommends narrating the party as having already arrived at the dungeon, a conceit I think more GMs should entertain -- we all know that "we meet in a tavern" is a little played out, but I think it's played out mainly because it's done badly - meeting in the tavern served no purpose because the GM ultimately wanted to just hurry up to the dungeon.

The adventure proper starts with a quick blurb about two famous characters who in the wayback times built a stronghold, did some adventurin', fought some wars, but are now long gone. A separate account of this is included in the player-facing section (whatever happened to player-facing sections?).

We are given ol' reliable, a rumors table, where we learn very little of interest: The dungeon is called Quasaqueton -- a real place in Iowa, apparently the duo were slavers, and apparently the dungeon itself talks. It's generally wet and miserable here, and wandering about are a variety of very standard enemies (orcs, kobolds, trogs, rats). That's, basically all we get on the dungeon itself, so let's enter the highlights reel:

The very first thing that happens in the dungeon is simply adorable. Two magic mouths demand the party to defend their treasure-hunting ways, and then promptly tell them they're going to die oooOoOOOOooOoo! in a sufficiently melodramatic way. It also bugs you every time you revisit, which will turn it into a comedy on revisit. There is also the grisly remains of a previous party, as if to imply that these newbies are about to get HAZED. Given that this was likely the new GM and players' first go, I'd call even odds on it being a slaughter.

It is at about room V where I realize why roman numerals died off, as trying to figure out where room 5 is when there's many, many rooms with a V marking. Letters are preferable to roman numerals but truly it was a good day when we switched to circled Arabic numerals.

There is just something inherently funny about going into a wizard's closet and discovering that said wizard was a boring person with normal clothes and a bunch of mundane books about weather and plants. We also find out Zelligar has been absent for 30+ years from his closet-bookkeeping.

Teaching the kids early that wizards are assholes, in Zelligar's practice room there's a permanent illusion of treasure. It doesn't kill you like a Gary treasure would, it just makes you sad.

There is a weirdly elaborate table of jars? And one of the jars is a living black cat in suspended animation? The purpose of this room is, and I quote, "to surprise and/or mystify the adventurers, as well as to provide some fun for the DM". There is no treasure or monsters pre-stocked in most any of these rooms (as per the conceit) but I think it would be GM malpractice to not put SOME kind of fucked up jarred magic item here. That there is no potions in this room feels particularly odd?

There's a riddle in the wizard's lab that, isn't actually a riddle? It's just talking funny. Large swaths of this dungeon feel like they should be a funhouse and have loot pinatas scattered around, this is one such room. Instead, it's…just kind of a self-aggrandizing sign, like a weird motivational poster.

I know the conceit of the dungeon is that this is someone's home and stronghold but it kind of just feels like someone's Minecraft fort? I really feel like we're going to walk into a room full of chests contain 94 doors and 4,000 grass seeds any minute now. And I guess that food is 30 years old? The inscrutable letter codes make me long for a dAlphabet.

It feels kinda weird that fire beetles fell out of use. "Magic lightning bugs that infinitely fuel lanterns without igniting in swamp gas" is a super handy conceit.

We have a super classic portcullis trap with a elegant twist: because the lever to lift the trap is strength-based (sum of strength scores), it almost definitionally separates the squishies from the tanks. The downside is, unfortunately, that it's functionally a save or die trap despite not instantly killing you?

It's also really interesting how the fantasy of bending the bars went away. That used to be such a big thing in the superman tv show era. I have yet to have a modern player even consider it. Not surprising it stopped being in rulebooks though.

There is one of the regulation early DND troll traps, where a mapping party is to be intentionally tricked and given false descriptions because a doorway is also a teleporter. It is explained somewhat poorly, which is particularly unfortunate for a tutorial dungeon, but the jist is that once they pass through the doorway you should rotate your map and act like you haven't started describing rooms turned 90 degrees. Because early DND kind-of assumes the party moves as a blob while in dungeoncrawl mode, you can't get split up by this, despite the fact that "realistically" it would totally do that. A weird quirk of this description is that, I have no idea when they bold words. You think they're bolding for emphasis but it's acting like they're bolding keywords, but prior to this they only bold spell names and the bar-lifting. Afterward it's mostly spells and a sole keyword.

I'm getting mixed messages here. I get why it's here, but come on.

The coverart is a reference to a specific garden room which has overgrown in the wizard's absence. It is, ultimately, just a pretty room with a slight hazard if a random encounter happens there. "The room on the cover is inexplicable and unrelated to the rest of the dungeon" is funhouse-y behavior IMO, but the rest of the dungeon is a series of vaguely plausible rooms assembled in a maze-y way. Which is as good a segue as any to briefly talk about the overall layout.

This is a bad layout. This is a layout you come up with when you are just procgenning maze dungeons over and over again. As we have demonstrated in previous posts, this is just kind of how it was in the 70s. This kind of works as a mapping challenge, but mostly it comes across as tedious for everyone involved. Who would make a living space like this? Even the most cooked adventurer on the planet would not install multiple maze corridors for…no reason? AND THE EXCESS OF SECRET DOORS. A friend described this as "a map you could almost make in Wolfenstein 3D", which is actually a great metric. If I can make your map in Wolf3D, it's bad.

There is a genre of dungeon room I like to call "gambler's traps", which is when the room contains like 10+ weird things that you can poke, and if you happen to poke the right ones you get some nice things, and if you poke the wrong ones you get pain. Invariably, you will have a player who tries to poke every one of them, offsetting the whole room. Pools of stuff are traditional, so we get pools. Tragically, every pool with a conceivably fun effect magically stops working outside the pool (come ON Carr!) and many are just pointless A few of them are totally devastating (one of them silences your voice for d6 hours), a few of them are slightly good. In what is a complete dick move, there is an acidic pool with a key at the bottom that does absolutely nothing.

Sigh you find the guy who advised the building of Quasqueton's room, with documents about the construction of it, but explicitly no information that could possibly help adventurers. One of the few magic items in this dungeon is locked in a drawer, but odds are it's nothing interesting (pray for your +1 Ring of Protection)

So the big maze corridor has a regulation spring-loaded trapdoor, which dumps you downstairs sans inventory into freezing cold water. Kinda mean but, sure. Traps are kind of an underrated artform, I feel like GMs as a group have just given up on them. That being said, traps like this one…do not sell me on traps as a concept.

Finally, we go to the lower level, which is not worth talking about in detail. Essentially, these egotists made a museum to themselves down here (for who?), there's a magic rock that if you eat it (??) has a d20 table of permanent effects skewing positive, and another pit trap. So, how to feel about B1 on the whole? It's not really remarkable. Really its most famous quality (you will key every single room) is its sole interesting quality. It's an early 70s dungeon that is starting to feel dated by 1979. I think that 5e-ers would benefit from a B1-like paint-by-numbers module, really. B1 is no Tower of Zenopus. I think we will all be much happier come B2, that (while far from perfect) has a strong identity and a comparative cohesiveness.

[justafellr]

Scrapped Emotion Concepts 2/2 Hope

Hope was going to represent my more optimistic, faithful and determined side and their design was based off of that of a blooming flower/seedling. I wanted to make an emotion that was the opposite to Anxiety in the sense that Hope eagerly anticipates for the best possible outcome while as Anxiety restlessly anticipates the worst possible outcomes. I eventually scrapped them and applied aspects of their personality to both Joy and Anxiety, with Joy being optimistic and trusting of every possible outcome, while Anxiety eagerly anticipates specific outcomes and hopes that they go smoothly, while also considering and preparing for the worst possible outcomes

Mirth/Freude/Amusement

Mirth/Freude/Amusement was going to represent my sense of humor and comedy. They don't take things very seriously and tends to find amusement in many things, even things that would be considered shameful. Tho this is never out of cruelty or sadism, but out of a wanting to make light of a situation and to bring joy and fun. I eventually scrapped them and applied the amusement aspect of their character into Joy. Their design was obviously based on Schadenfreude concept from the original film lol

Wonder/Amazement/Awe/Surprise

This was an emotion that was hell to work on tbh. I wanted to make an emotion that was supposed to represent that sense of bewilderment, shock, amazement and surprise. As a for their personality, gave them a very surfer mentality, very easily shocked and very curious to put it simply. I wanted to make an emotion that was going to encompass all of that but I could never settle on a proper name for them. I scrapped them inevitably for the sake of my sanity, but also felt like it was just TOO brief of an experience to give it a personality. Also thought aspects of it's purpose and personality could meld with other emotions, like Joy, Amore, Envy, Anxiety and Fear. If I ever properly come up with a solid name and personality, I might include them Contempt

Contempt was a fun experiment. They are a completely original emotion that was supposed to represent that feeling of superiority, judgement and that sense of scorn. Their design is inspired by that of Law and Court motifs. Their head shaped was based off of court scales with the hair acting as the weights, and their wardrobe was that of the judge fit. While a fun character to design and conceptualize, I never actually made them a part of the group since I felt aspects of their personality could encompass emotions like Disgust, Anger or Ennui

All and all, those were all of my scrapped concepts. Thx for reading! I will soon make sum doodles of comics and scenarios of my emotions to show their personalities and interactions shine Stay tuned! :333

[alanshee-keeper-of-realms]

Again I say it Alastor and Vox reminds me of OG Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny VS Daffy Duck

The old Psychopath Vs Sociopath dynamic, with Vox trying to tear down Alastor and the Radio demon not giving two shits, letting Vox defeat himself

Down to Alastors movements and the slapstick comedy with him, it just screams old Tex Avery animation and again I don't know if this is on purpose but

I'm loving seeing a modern take on this dynamic with 2 completely new characters,