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a lil writing sideblog

[twothousandeight]

"[Gothic fiction] wants to see the relationship between the modern world and the past - not as one of evolution or development - but of sudden juxtaposition and often violent conflict, in which the past erupts within the present and deranges it."

— John Bowen, University of York

[aridante]

George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy

[valtsv]

addicted to relationships where one person is a ghost but it's unclear who's haunting who

[valtsv]

am i haunting you or are you haunted by me? did i call you or am i the one answering? do you know which one of us died that night?

[lucidloving]

In the Blood— John Mayer // @lucidloving // @chaosinline on Instagram // Édouard Levé, Suicide // @futngina // @lucidloving

[prokopetz]

Ten inessential worldbuilding features for local communities in your fantasy RPG:

A grievance or conflict of interest with a neighbouring community which the community's members feel much more strongly about than the issue's magnitude really warrants

A substance or commodity important to everyday life with no local source, and the complicated and inconvenient arrangement the community has made to obtain it from outside sources

A local practice or custom whose original motivation has been rendered obsolete by changing circumstances, and which is now carried forward out of tradition

Something that's technically illegal, but everyone does it on the sly anyway, with enforcement of its illegality being reserved for people the community's leaders want to mess with for unrelated reasons

An obscure piece of trivia or local history which the community's members regard as obvious and widely known, to the extent of treating outsiders with contempt for revealing their ignorance of it

Some undertaking or realm of achievement in which the community isn't particularly exceptional, but which the community's members believe they're the best around at as a point of civic pride

A mostly harmless thing that nobody talks about because its existence or some facet of its historical context is regarded as an embarrassment to the community

A particular prank that's become traditional to play on visitors to the community, and which occasionally gets taken further than is strictly appropriate

A specific area of the setting's history where what the community's members insist really happened is wildly at odds with the accepted version of events

A genuinely dangerous circumstance that everyone treats with casual disregard because it's always been there, and only a damn fool would actually get hurt by it anyway

[valena-nedela]

Combining them - a local extremely dangerous monster/cryptid that no one ever does anything about (10) because it follows certain Rules and anyone who doesn't deal with it properly frankly got what they deserved (5).

I'm from West Virginia. The mothman has official stats in Pathfinder. This is absolutely how we would handle things if it were real.

[prokopetz]

Yeah, 5+10 is always a fun combo. Other frequently entertaining ones include 1+6, 2+4 and 3+9.

[boss-of-armadildos]

Favorite variations:

#1, but it's a purely one-sided conflict that the other side has no idea even exists.

#6 where every small community derives pride out of being the best at exactly the same thing.

[lifewithoutcosette-deactivated2]

[angelnumbers]

[mythosphere]

Iphigenia when she can't be her father's number one boy vs. Elektra and the collusion between father and daughter that does not save the daughter from the mother's fate

[motherhouse]

- House Mothers and Haunted Daughters: Shirley Jackson and Female Gothic

[kosmogrl]

just saw this and it made me sob.

[magica-pseudoacademica]

“In early modern Scotland the term “fairy” seems to have covered a wide range of spirits and supernatural beings who were condemned, or whose existence was disputed, by the church. And among the most controversial of these were “spirits of the dead”. Although the reformed church taught that the dead were not able to re-appear to the living after death, people often claimed that they had seen deceased friends and relatives among the fairies or, less commonly, that a deceased friend or relative was a fairy. Both fairies and spirits of the dead who consorted with them resembled saints in the sense that they were believed to possess supernatural powers and could be petitioned for a variety of benefits, but they differed from their holier counterparts in that they displayed more moral ambivalence and enjoyed a more ambiguous relationship with Christianity. This dissonance was further reflected in the fact that these categories of spirit did not live in heaven, but in fairyland or “elphame”, where they adopted a strange, similacrum of human life: feasting under fairy hills, hunting with horses and packs of hounds, and following the fairy king and queen on their nocturnal processions through houses and across the night skies.”

— Emma Wilby, The Visions of Isobel Gowdie: Magic, Witchcraft and Dark Shamanism in Seventeenth-Century Scotland (2010)

[swordbymyside]

[powerbottomblake]

toxic dysfunctional complex sibling relationships will always always be IT it'll always sweep it'll always top romance you can't undo a blood bond it'll always exist you can't unmake it it lives it lives you both breathe it and it lives even long after one or both parties are dead

this is why stories with compelling sibling arcs will always fuck you up irreversibly and in very specific way. it's like, you are my mirror you are my opposite you are my foil you are my blood i see myself through you i recognize myself because you exist and no one can ever destroy me quite the way you can.

[hustlerose]

loomer gf

always looming

portentious

only wears black

"the final hour draws near"

hiding in the shadows

"a terrible fate awaits you"

raspy voice

tall and grim-faced

won't let you think straight

"i have to consult the bones"

[feral-ballad]

Linda Pastan, from Waiting for My Life: Poems; "What We Want"

[Text ID: "and in the morning / our arms ache. / We don't remember the dream, / but the dream remembers us."]

[goreprofonde]

“i crawl into my lovers’ bodies as i would to a grave, satiated and sweetened/sickened by your hands, hands, hands—you are everywhere in me. how hypocritical, your head sagged in prayer or something very close to it. father, i am still waiting for the flames you promised me.”

- Andy Pérez, to my father: a list of people i slept with this year and didn’t call back.

[manon-de]

“The whole house has been wrong since the quarrel of Atreus and Thyestes. Atreus was hideous in murder, but this does not justify Aegisthus in murdering Agamemnon, any more than the sins of Agamemnon justified his murder by Clytemnestra, or the sins of Paris and Helen justified the obliteration of Troy. All the executioners plead that they act for just retribution, but the chain of murder has got out of hand and is perpetuating itself, until it seems no longer to come from personal purpose but has grown into a Curse, a Thing. Every correction is a blood-bath which calls for new correction. ‘The truth stands ever beside God’s throne eternal: he who has wrought shall pay; that is law. Then who shall tear the curse from their blood? The seed is stiffened to ruin.’ Clytemnestra answers, over the corpse of Agamemnon, that she has been bloody but the house is clean. No more evil need be done. Orestes is to make the same claim over the corpse of Clytemnestra herself. Both are mistaken.”

—

Richmond Lattimore, Introduction to The Oresteia by Aeschylus (1953)

[fearlastyear]

—Sophocles, Antigonick (tr. Anne Carson)