RMH
Keni
ojovivo
oozey mess
KIROKAZE
No title available
Sweet Seals For You, Always
noise dept.
pixel skylines
occasionally subtle
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Love Begins
Claire Keane
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
macklin celebrini has autism
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Xuebing Du
No title available
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
seen from India
seen from Bolivia
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Brazil
seen from Senegal
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Algeria
seen from Türkiye
seen from Italy
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Mexico
@catgirlkirito
Every work of art says things the creator hasn’t considered, but if you’ve really thought about what you’re trying to say then generally the additional dimensions you didn’t know it had are in alignment with your purpose, whereas if you think you’re making no cultural comment at all you are actually making a LOT of cultural comments, most of which will be unflattering to you
Porn is one of the most culturally rich types of media imaginable so the answer is: you cannot do this
i'll always make fun of how stupid the "born evil baby" trope is but truly it is such a wretched trope i hope it dies forever
it's like the perfect package of "child you are allowed to harm" and "easy way to not interrogate how commonplace child abuse is". thank goodness this child was simply born wrong, we never have to examine the conditions they grew up in.
i love characters who do the “i worship the myth i make of you” and in turn dehumanize and get wrong the object of their devotion and love. yes project a thing that does not exist onto a pedestal and kneel at it like it is your altar. this will surely not blow up in both of your faces eventually
How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)
after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while
read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.
you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.
anyway after that i wrote a lot.
i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.
and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.
the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?
read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.
#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)
i'll always make fun of how stupid the "born evil baby" trope is but truly it is such a wretched trope i hope it dies forever
it's like the perfect package of "child you are allowed to harm" and "easy way to not interrogate how commonplace child abuse is". thank goodness this child was simply born wrong, we never have to examine the conditions they grew up in.
there is only one sao arc that is genuinely shit from a butt and anyone that says its fairy dance is actually lying for the sake of wokeness or whatever. its the arc where klein falls in love with that one npc that turns out to be like an old ass king with a beard. and its crazy because you know what comes right after that arc? the best season in any anime ever
I would trust klein with my drink at a bar
Honestly the fact that Kirito has no real social media literacy, not because anything is being said about social media or his relationship to it but because it never ever comes up because kirito and his social life were constructed before social media and then the author never added that element when it became totalizing irl, is maybe the thing that MOST dates SAO's characters to their particular cultural moment. Kirito's method of socializing and defining his identity is through online spaces, but it's an understanding of online spaces that is not actually representative of how that mediation was happening- a social life comprising of logging onto an MMO or an online forum to hang out with your friends instead of hopping onto a discord VC, and where your online status is managed by your presence as defined by what you have done in a shared space and what ideas about you circulate due to it rather than via what you're posting on social media, is a model of online social life that is in 2025 outdated- or, if you believe in the metaverse as inevitable, too early to loop back around.
Kirito's own experience of his reputation is telling. The limits this reputation imposes on him, as described by his own accounting of the effects he experiences in the text, are of alienation when the reputation is primarily negative, and distant admiration when it is primarily positive. His reputation makes it near-impossible to interact with people on neutral ground, and in some contexts, causes people to try to challenge him to prove something, a fight they inevitably lose before Kirito moves on with his day. What his reputation doesn't do, even though it absolutely would in the 2020s unless he went out of his way to avoid it, is make him into an influencer or a social media personality or a public figure outside the boundaries of his own hobbies.
Maybe this is what people are talking about when they pose the question of 'the loss of the digital third place'. There is a qualitative difference between a forum and Twitter, even if it's not one that's very easy to locate and articulate at a surface level. The way you behave in a forum thread is a construction of the self based on how you want people to percieve you, but the mechanics of it change when it's not merely a performance channeled towards the ongoing topic of discussion but one that can exist in a feed where reaching an audience completely outside of your own context is not just expected but desirable.
This also extends to the ways information about Aincrad seems to be circulated in the real world, because it does so in ways that I absolutely can't imagine actually playing out that way IRL in the 2020s.
In Phantom Bullet arc, during the scenes of Kirito's friend group watching the tournament stream from inside ALO, it becomes very explicit that the existence of the Laughing Coffin guild is NOT information known to anyone who wasn't there. Suguha, one of the non aincrad survivor characters with MOST INCENTIVE to absorb as much information about aincrad without having to ask her friends about their trauma, has no idea what Laughing Coffin is.
In general there's an implication that what happened in Aincrad stayed in Aincrad, that the only way to figure out would be to personally ask someone who was there at the time.
I find this incredibly hard to believe. I'm pretty sure that in this situation one of the first things that would happen is that people would interview as MANY survivors as would possibly agree to give statements, and many survivors would probably just make AMAs or something on their own. This would become Content, because that's part of how we deal with huge events in the modern social media era.
Kazuto being just a normal guy in the survivor school is at least understandable as part of a collective unspoken agreement that what happens in aincrad stays in aincrad. Because otherwise it seems bizarre to imagine that he just hangs out with people his age in class and after it and they call him kazu and are friendly with him when EXPLICITLY they all know he was The Guy Who Ended The Game and also before that he was one of the most hated and ostracized people on Aincrad.
However, again, I can buy this not causing friction, guilt, or resentment from either Kazuto or his peers BECAUSE the school is a space that by definition exclusively contains survivors AND is organized around getting those survivors back on track for normal social life and giving them back the school years they lost. everyone on some level probably kind of understands that this is not a space to relitigate or even acknowledge what happened in aincrad, and in fact the space is ONLY bearable is everyone on some level deliberately compartmentalizes like this, for much the same reason that people inside aincrad treated talking about the real world as a taboo.
So this is a model that works within face to face Aincrad survivor communities, but it CANNOT be expected to hold in a broader online social context.
Early in Alicization (as in, in the one prologue scene before Kirito gets put in a coma and wakes up in a military experiment) it's mentioned that there's s book out that's a dramatized recounting of the events of Aincrad and Kirito for obvious reasons features prominently. They ONLY bring this up as a way to dunk on Kirito because of how cheesy the dialogue they gave him is.
This... seems insane to me to imagine this could be published and taken this lightly. First of all it's insane to imagine that a physical book published over a full year after the end of the incident would be the first or defining account of it because, again, there would be content mills digging every single survivor statement and amateur documentary style YouTube explainers within the week.
And more than that, the way it's framed is almost quaint. oh, kirito, the public perception of your aincrad identity is too cool and it's innacurate, this is a funny and embarrassing detail about something that concerns you, but doesn't actually affect your day to day life in any way that would make this a serious thing rather than something to poke and tease you about.
Like, even if we accept that Kirito is a type of guy who would not have public social media (most likely this would be the case post sao, but again, it would have to be a decision in a way it isn't really in the text), this ABSOLUTELY would affect you psychologically because this CANNOT be assumed to be just a niche thing, especially when Kirito continues to play VRMMMOs with the same username and playstyle. It's not like he Only interacts with survivors, even if most of his actual close friendgroup is just survivors.
Hurt people do hurt people, man. Eugeo didn't ONCE think about Selka during his big spiral. I think he only mentions her when literally listing everyone hes ever fucking met as someone he has let down. For someone so fucked up over being alone and unseen and unacknowledged, he constantly rebuffed and then forgot the one person who desperately needed to connect with him.
Eugeo has so many passages about how isolating it was that no one spoke about or even acknowledged what happened to Alice, but he also never talked to Selka about it despite Selka being THE ONLY PERSON IN THE VILLAGE WHO REFUSED TO PRETEND ALICE DIDN'T EXIST.
Selka needed closure and Eugeo couldn't provide it. That's understandable, he was fucking traumatized. But he just memoryholed her afterwards, so deep that even Quinella's systematic excavation of his repressed psyche didn't bring her up ONCE.
And now here we are in Volume 15. The only person in Rulid who cried at the news of Eugeo's death is Selka.
i always find it fascinating when a character gets headcanoned as both transmasc and transfem by different members of the fandom because it like. highlights how being closeted and stealth can look similar from the outside but are internally very different experiences. does your blorbo have a Thing (tm) about gender because they're trying to beat down the part of them that desperately wants to transition? or did they start transitioning a decade ago and view it as private information that theyre not gonna talk about casually. choose wisely because your answer may have implications.
if you like a piece of media that is good eventually youll more or less run out of things to say about how good it is but if you like a piece of media that is objectively pretty mediocre but also somehow deeply compelling thats how the demons get you
i wrote a post on my blog about how beater is a slur in volume 1. does anyone want to see it, since i think i cant link it in the post itself or tumblr will eat the post
The all-guy team plus one long-suffering girl who exists mostly to remind us that these dudes are theoretically heterosexual is of course a cartoon classic, but we shouldn't forget its counterpart, the all-girl team plus one moderately autistic-coded dude who's very keen to be treated as just one of the girls.
Honestly the fact that Kirito has no real social media literacy, not because anything is being said about social media or his relationship to it but because it never ever comes up because kirito and his social life were constructed before social media and then the author never added that element when it became totalizing irl, is maybe the thing that MOST dates SAO's characters to their particular cultural moment. Kirito's method of socializing and defining his identity is through online spaces, but it's an understanding of online spaces that is not actually representative of how that mediation was happening- a social life comprising of logging onto an MMO or an online forum to hang out with your friends instead of hopping onto a discord VC, and where your online status is managed by your presence as defined by what you have done in a shared space and what ideas about you circulate due to it rather than via what you're posting on social media, is a model of online social life that is in 2025 outdated- or, if you believe in the metaverse as inevitable, too early to loop back around.
Kirito's own experience of his reputation is telling. The limits this reputation imposes on him, as described by his own accounting of the effects he experiences in the text, are of alienation when the reputation is primarily negative, and distant admiration when it is primarily positive. His reputation makes it near-impossible to interact with people on neutral ground, and in some contexts, causes people to try to challenge him to prove something, a fight they inevitably lose before Kirito moves on with his day. What his reputation doesn't do, even though it absolutely would in the 2020s unless he went out of his way to avoid it, is make him into an influencer or a social media personality or a public figure outside the boundaries of his own hobbies.
Maybe this is what people are talking about when they pose the question of 'the loss of the digital third place'. There is a qualitative difference between a forum and Twitter, even if it's not one that's very easy to locate and articulate at a surface level. The way you behave in a forum thread is a construction of the self based on how you want people to percieve you, but the mechanics of it change when it's not merely a performance channeled towards the ongoing topic of discussion but one that can exist in a feed where reaching an audience completely outside of your own context is not just expected but desirable.
Being critical of your interests is sooooo fun when you have the critic gene & then you sound kind of insane to the average tv watcher when you're like "this is my favorite show, It's Racist" & then you try to clarify what you mean & get that [Speech (legendary) - FAILURE] "the racism is really interesting though"
[Speech (legendary) - SUCCESS] I find the sociopolitical context of pulpy old sci-fi born circa the civil rights movement really fascinating to analyze especially when it was progressive for its time but still reveals the writers' unexamined biases in the subtext
Now to the untrained eye you might be thinking. Wouldn't you rather watch a show that isn't racist? But that's the fuck of it all, nothing is free of The Context and The Subtext. Everything is lowkey racist. And I like star trek
truly anything can be good if you do enough textual analysis
fandom at its core is about asking the age old question “what if they were doing that shit on purpose” and then they weren’t
i like characters who feel like nothing. they have no desires or needs, trust them on that. they just want to help others and do nothing for themself. i like characters who are very convinced that they are nothing, inferior, worse compared to the people around them. i like characters who have decided the best thing they can do for others is to give away everything they have and save nothing for themself. characters who have very little autonomy, characters who try to have no personal opinions. characters that are totally fine with being smothered and talked over. characters that look to others for decisions, characters that need others to tell them what to do. as long as other people are happy, you know?
