#why am i just now learning about this

[xxlavenderbloodxx]

I CANT BREATHEE I DIDNT LNOW YOU COULD FUXJUNG KNOCK OUT HIS TOOTH

[wordwings]

*kicks down your door* It might seem like a plot hole that no one thought about the possibility of Dracula being invited into the asylum by Renfield (or any other patient) but actually it speaks to the way Renfield’s personhood is being denied mainly by Jack Seward, but also the rest of the crew in part through their reliance on Seward’s expertise. Which also ties into the way they have decided to shut out Mina at the very same time. It literally just did not occur to them that the patients living in the same building as them would have any claim to the residency that allows someone to grant the permission a vampire needs to enter a home. But of course the asylum is the patients’ home just as much as it is Jack’s! They live there! In short this fatal blow dealt to the heroes at this crucial juncture comes about through both their sexism and their ableism. Good night. *puts your door back on its hinges again and leaves*

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Who is this sassy lost child?

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[uncanny-tranny]

Not a day goes by where I do not think about the advent of medicine like PrEP and wonder just what the people - especially queer people - who passed from HIV/AIDs during the AIDs crisis would think

And then, I read this survivor's testimony and it just makes me emotional. I think this is the closest answer we have. HIV has changed, and we must always remember the people who didn't see that change before it happened.

[fatedroses]

Two former military elites taking merc jobs perform absolutely hellish battle tactics together.

[sparkles-rule-4eva]

Hey guys so we saw this drawing, presumably on the wall of Sonic's old cave, right?

Did y'all catch that he drew Longclaw with the flower that he'd tried to give her right before she died?

[marimeeko]

After the fifth time that Katsuki pops up at UA, surprising Izuku with Bento for lunch, calling him "sensei" in a cocky(affectionate) tone, Kouta just stops at Izuku's desk on his way out of the room and asks him point blank,

"So are you and DynaMight actually dating, or what?"

Izuku sputtering and dropping all of his paperwork and avoiding the question out of sheer dumbfoundedness.

Then, the sixth time that Katsuki barges in, as he is thrusting the bento into Izukus hands as usual, Kota raises his hand, and stands up from his seat and yells out,

"DynaMight, sir!! Pardon me, but are you dating Deku-Sensei??" And the whole class gasps and whispers. Katsuki appears just as dumbfounded as he looks wide-eyed at Kouta and the students.

"Kouta!" Izuku balks, but then Katsuki suddenly grins mischievously. Izuku doesn't trust that look...

"Well, brat, maybe I SHOULD date him, then I could make sure Sensei doesn't forget to eat every day, right??" Katsuki looked entirely too pleased at the louder gasps and chatter that came from the students. He has a wicked grin as he turns his sharp red eyes back to Izuku.

"K-Kacchan, what are you doing?!" Izuku stammers, beet red and grabbing his arm. "This is not the time for--"

"If you don't want me disrupting your class, then stop leaving your Bento in the fridge!!" Katsuki scolds Izuku before swinging himself back out of the open window. There was a fresh wave of gasps and excited murmuring at the insinuationthat the two lived together. "We're ROOM MATES, OK?" He adds hastily, pointing his finger at the noisy classroom of kids.

He drops out the window and blasts off.

Izuku is left, stood at his desk, hands planted and hanging his head, trying to collect enough of himself to quell the riotous theories now flying around his classroom.

Kouta stands at his own desk amidst his unruly classmates, eyes narrowed as if he had just realized something, "I knew it!" He hisses.

"You're the worst," Izuku texts Katsuki later.

"I know" katsuki replies.

"Now eat your fuckin food or I'll stop making it for you."

--

I think I was inspired by this art post ^^;

[erinwantstowrite]

the past couple of days i was doing a lot of stuff but mostly deep cleaning our house and something i noticed while listening to my mom's true crime videos was that you can rarely find a channel that doesn't add stupid fucking music to the background like it's a horror movie- or even more inappropriate cheerful music.

and that REALLY bothers me because these are people's REAL lives we're talking about here... when i watch true crime anything i have to go out of my way to find channels that don't sensationalize it or disrespect the victims in any way. recently, one of the channels i watch has started showing signs of leaning towards this kind of content, when previously they hadn't done so. and it's disappointing. i'm a big believer in music elevating a story but it just feels gross to put it here. or to keep doing moments like "but this horrifying secret will come to light later", etc etc

[alexandraisyes]

The cutest reminder ever that the way family works in TSAMS canon is that two parties have to be in mutual agreement that they are family. If one party doesn't agree then they aren't family. Parties can revoke familial ties whenever they want and that means they are no longer family.

"Code Relation" theory is stupid because you're then implying that Eclipse is Sun and Moon's child. Which he isn't. Or that Killcode is somehow Moon's child and his brother at the same time that he's Eclipse, Lunar and Bloodmoon's "father" at the same time that they're Sun and Moon's grand children. Like, we're seeing the issue here, right?

Don't make things more complicated than it has to be. Just accept the fact that family is literally determined by a verbal agreement between two animatronics and nothing else because none of them were born from wombs. That means respecting canon when characters in canon decide that they aren't comfortable being family (like Eclipse) or just straight-up disown everyone (like Bloodmoon). It's okay to have headcanons, but don't try to push them onto canon.

[sidesteppostinghours]

ok. question.

ortega ended up hallucinating sidestep after they "died", but sidestep doesnt know about that. they know it got bad, but never the full extent of how their death affected them. so if your sidestep Did learn, if they found out ortega looked for them in every little piece they could, would that change anything for your sidesteps? would their relationship with ortega be any different?

[oakitty]

literally why are people so mad that this episode was about billy and not about agatha and rio. like who caaaaares !!! it was a good episode!!! if we never got a back story for billy non-comic readers would be so confused.

like, i am an agathario fan as much as the next lesbian, but romance isnt the be all and end all of story telling. i appreciated the building of the somewhat-familial relationship between billy and agatha, and the recontextualizing of said relationship.

that being said i definitely want them (agatha and rio) to have SOME kind of intimate scene bc i wanna see those hot women kiss

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I'm a convert as well and as a person of Native American descent, I do believe that Jews and Native Americans share a unique experience of our history being ignored. We both have very small populations which makes it easier to not think about us and the world treats us as fictional and at the same time extinct. As a leftist, people would try to learn about Native Americans because they see us as these poor innocent brown victims which is dehumanizing and I noticed that they didn't even bother with Jews as if they think we get too much attention or control the world.

I had to tell my ex friends over and over that no we weren't oppressed because of our religion and they still never got it. The most basic Jewish things are not known by most or understood by those who do know!

Posting without additional commentary because this is perfect. Thank you for sharing, I'm sending a ton of love your way🫂🫂🫂

[foundfamilynonsense]

Y’know. Anakin was a real asshole in Ahsoka’s hallucination.

Like. She mentions something about what she’ll be able to teach her padawan one day, since all she’s being taught is how to be a soldier, and Anakin’s like “teaching’s not all it’s cracked up to be”

And like. Asshole move. And Ahsoka rightfully calls him out on it. And he goes on the whole “uuuh I was joking. Lighten up.” Literally a complete jackass.

But beyond how he answered the question, it’s a valid complaint Ahsoka is bringing up! Anakin’s teaching her how to live or die. But Ahsoka wants to be taught how to be a jedi.

What happens after the war is over (order 66 never happens) and she now has to navigate a galaxy without a war? The Jedi take teaching very seriously there’s no greater honor than teaching a padawan. And she’s not being accurately taught, so she will not be able to pass anything on to the next generation.

But Anakin brushes it aside because he simply does not respect her or her wishes. Like. He never wanted a padawan, despite teaching being foundational to the Jedi. And he only took ahsoka in because he started to like her and became attached to her. He doesn’t care about jedi legacy, not really. So he brushes her comment off with a joke.

But in the rest of the vision… idk it didn’t feel like we were supposed view Anakin as entirely wrong here. He wasn’t in the right, he was definitely channeling Vader and being an ass, but he was basically the reason Ahsoka survived the fall, right? Bc he was making her choose life? When Ahsoka wins against him it’s sort of like she’s both learned his lesson and moved beyond him. And then for the rest of the season he’s only talked about in positive ways.

And like. That one line ahsoka said was really powerful in relation to the entire point of the show. What does she have to pass onto her own padawan (Sabine) if she wasn’t properly trained herself? That is, perhaps, the only valid plot question asked in the entire show. And it doesn’t get an answer. It’s never even brought up again.

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[sysig]

Growing closer than expected (Patreon)

[marimbles]

i miss carpisuns sometimes </3