The new Odyssey adaptation has inevitably gotten people talking about a Muppet version of it, and they’re frequently suggesting Kermit as Odysseus, Miss Piggy as Penelope.
I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:
We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.
Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?
Go to your liked songs (or equivalent) and hit shuffle. What are the first 10 songs?
Oh boy so.. I dont have spotify and im counting anything thats primarily music audio. just for fun :] all links go to youtube.
1. NICCOLO
2. VORACE
3. Opeth- The Leper Affinity
4. Shayne Leighton- Behind Your Eyes
5. Shayne Leighton and Alexandra Santana- Send Down The Angels
(Yeah i watched that jenny nicholson video about knock-off twilight)
6. Holding Absence- Gravity (when???. Oh well no cheating)
7. Fuckin. Transformers 40th anniversary special movie (gotta have your vpn set to japan to view)
8. Vinland saga openings 1-4 (i can be the biggest anime hater and still appreciate the opening/closing bits 😤)
9. Rock The Dragon Animation Jam
10. Iron Maiden- Out Of The Silent Planet
Honestly this all feels pretty predictable :/
Ok tagging! @dailycupofcreativitea @mayakoroz @cosmic-writes-novels @ohnomykokoro @peridotite @moewaenae @wyrmhere and anyone else who enjoys oversharing specific bullshit 🫡
Your artstyle is like your gut microbiome in the way its everything you consume and like and it also has all your bacteria up in it. Thats probably how that works
"shipping and blorbofication are not inherently at odds with understanding a story's deep themes" and "some people can't grasp the themes of a story because they never learned how to engage with stories outside of the lens of shipping and blorbofication" are two statements that can coexist
blorbofication to me is when you love a character in such a laser focus way that you somewhat detach them from the narrative from which they are inserted and treat them in a way roughly similar to how you'd treat an oc for which you still have no story and just like to put them in situations just for fun. which there's nothing wrong with btw, it's just that it can easily lead to people forgetting the character engine in a narrative and not just a barbie doll
as an example of blorbofication taken to the extreme without the acknowledgement of the story context to ground it please refer to the thomas jefferson miku binder
hi. i've been quiet a while and it's because of writer's block (everyone's old enemy.) i come back to you stronger than ever with a book i'll actually finish this time around
i call it THE TENANT
it's about a man in toronto whose body is being slowly rearranged by something that lives inside him. he gets more beautiful. his skin clears up. his posture improves. his boyfriend — daniel, a furniture maker — can't stop touching him. his mother says he looks well for the first time in years. everyone he loves prefers what's replacing him. and he agrees. that's what made me write this whole thing. he agrees
he is, of course, still in there. watching. losing
i don't want to summarise the whole thing, so here's a piece of chapter one. he's just had a coffee with daniel, who's gone up to their bedroom. he's alone in the kitchen. this is the first time he notices something is wrong:
And my hand closed.
I can find no better words for it, and I've sat over this page a long while tonight trying. I meant to put the mug down — the smallest, stalest motion there is, the hand opens and the held object leaves it — and my hand, in place of opening, shut. It bore down. The force of it went out through my fingers into the handle, the thumb-pad blanched white against the china, and the mug didn't set to the counter, because I wouldn't allow it to. I stood over the counter with my five fingers locked bloodless round a coffee mug and I said to them, in the wordless grammar a man keeps for his self, open — and they did not open.
and then, later on, once the changes have started to take. this is what he's had to admit to himself:
Here's the thing I've been walking around. I feel well. Not brave, or the febrile lightness of a frightened man talking himself up. I sleep. I who haven't slept properly since my twenties go down into sleep at eleven and come up at six with the whole night behind me, smooth and unbroken. My appetite's come back. Colours are a little brighter to me than they were, the tomatoes on the sill almost too red to look straight at. And I'm better at work. That's the flattest way to say it, and the most frightening. The apology has gone out of my sentences.
it's a slow horror where the horror is that everyone congratulates you. there's no exorcism or reveal that it was stress all along. the narrator survives in the backseat of a better life, and the people who love him have never been happier. what you read is his journal
i'll be posting chapter snippets and whatever else turns up while i push through the draft and lose my sanity
I think that would be so much funny. He wakes up on a remote beach in Jamaica and he only speaks/understands Brythonic and Medieval Latin. Locals assume he was a tourist who fell from a cruise ship or received a head injury and floated away from a resort. The authorities cannot match his description to any missing persons reports and his fingerprints and DNA produce no hits on INTERPOL. They suspect he may be Welsh or French because the language he speaks resembles Welsh or Breton but France and the UK both state he is not a citizen of their country. Stateless and deeply confused, he is taken in by the community near the beach where he was found, being cared for by a number of local families and doing odd jobs. He slowly learns English and adjusts to the contemporary world, uncertain if his belief that he is the legendary King Arthur was formed by whatever traumatic event caused him to end up Jamaica or if he is actually King Arthur and Prydain is in eminent peril. Mysterious letters from Morgan begin to reaffirm his belief he is King Arthur. He must choose between staying in Jamaica and continuing the happy life he has made for himself or finding a way to get back to Britain without any documentation.
He gets to Britain and everyone expects him to sound like a posh noble Englishman because that is the picture Malory painted but he prefers to speak Welsh and when he has to speak English, he speaks with a thick Jamaican accent.
If you like blood and shit and vomit and crying babies and guts and eyeballs and unlicensed surgery and not a single word spoken then you should try Mad God.
Recently I started the webcomic Unsounded since physical copies were recently released of the first two books and I tend to do better reading physical books. Comics are not usually my medium of choice so I wasn't sure how I would like it going in but I can say that I really enjoyed reading this first book and will be continuing my read online until the next books come out!
Anyways, here are some of my first thoughts/notes I took while reading. I will say I have some spoilers of the later chapters but nothing I can get a clear picture of. Some of these things might be "wrong" and explained in later chapters, but I wanted to preserve some of my first predictions/notions here!
Sette is awesome, I love her already. I love the balance between her street smarts and pluck with the naivete of a child. She has internalized a lot of Da's lessons and is fiercely loyal to him.
There seems to me a glimmer of conflict in her between what her Da says and what she feels. For example, when the Mamalen dies she does end up apologizing to Duane though her Da would probably encourage her to feel no remorse. This happens again when she gets caught lying to Duane. Being caught doesn't stop her from lying, which she continues to do without hesitation. Of course, this could be evidence of her manipulating him pretending to be sorry but I don't believe that's the entire truth; it feels more complicated.
She seems particularly sensitive herself to being lied to and also seems to want to be useful. But on the flip side, she also doesn't want to be left alone. This really does make me feel how her life back in Shartshane might be like as the daughter of a crime boss, especially with her desire to prove her blood and the supposed threat of being disposed should she fail.
Really love how Sette says "He's only doing as his boss says, ya can't crash him for it!" right after the scene of Da giving her instructions.
Duane seems to be a very empathetic character but also full of himself which is a good contrast to how his physical state as a rotting corpse appears to everyone else. The thing that struck me the most was how Sette was kinda right about him being a "child lover", although not in the way that she meant it.
Like Quigley, he seems to have a very strong distaste for violence against children; perhaps Aldish culture values children very highly? Both of them tend to lose their cool when the child they are responsible for gets into danger (or in the case of Quigley, just the mention of it).
I'm certain that the child we see show up, Mikaila?, was/is his daughter. She has the same green eyes as Sette.
I am guessing Duane was of a higher caste than Quigley, his arrogance seems to mark that.
Duane burns the body of Cara and Sette remarks on how this is unusual for her culture. I wonder if this is so that dead bodies can't be reanimated to be used as plods?
The idea of Aldish society sorting people by hair color is brilliant because my first reaction was "wow that's so stupid and arbitrary!" And then. You remember real life and skin color and... yeah, what a good reflection. I wonder if this was inspired by Indian castes? I don't know much about it but that's the comparison that came to mind.
The plods as slave labor. Ok so something that I immediately took note of was how the plods's arms were bound and they were all muzzled. If they're mindless, why do this? Of course, it could just be to prevent them from consuming the living, but as with many things in this story, I get the impression things are more complicated than that.
False prediction: halfway through book one I had a prediction made about the whole slave trade. I thought that perhaps the leaders of Cresce and Alderode were secretly in cahoots and that Alderode was taking the lifespan of the slaves (something they mention they do to their lower castes) then Cresce was reanimating their dead bodies to use as plods. I thought the cutting was perhaps part of the process?
This seems to have been quite off base 😅 as they seem to be using the cavities to smuggle first materials which is a lot simpler an explanation lmao.
Final thing I want to say is how much I really appreciate and enjoy how developed all these characters are! It feels like all of them have specific viewpoints that make sense from their past experiences and cultures. For example, while I appreciate Duane's empathy/fighting Quigley when he thought he was a slaver, I also appreciated Quigley pointing out Duane's own biases about the caste system of their home country and quipping about his arrogance.
Hope this was a little entertaining to read! You know who you are, but thank you to the person that kept poking me to read this, I hate love that you have good taste and know it and certainly never laugh at me whenever I end up enjoying your recommendations 😊
Flying all around Fantastica looking for the border to the human world, Atreyu and Falkor meet the Four Wind Giants, who tell them Fantastica has no borders. Atreyu then gets blown off Falkor, losing AURYN in the process. He lands near the horror section in Fantastica's metaphorical library, Spook City in the Land of Ghosts. After watching a parade of Spook City's creatures throwing themselves into The Nothing in despair, Atreyu finds the only other living thing still in Spook City, Gmork the werewolf. Chained up and dying, Gmork tells Atreyu that Fantastica is all fantasy, and the only way to get to the human world is through The Nothing, but that all Fantasticans who do so will become lies in the process. Gmork reveals he's a dimension-traveler sent here, presumably by whatever's behind The Nothing, to kill Atreyu before he could a human to rename the Empress. With his dying breath, Gmork bites onto Atreyu, trapping the boy as The Nothing consumes the city.
Book vs Movie
You can tell by the summary being slighter longer than usual that Spook City's one of the more intense and crucial chapters, and probably my favourite of the first half of the book. Which is impressive given it's just one werewolf talking a bunch, but that's excusable when Gmork has some profound, and fittingly scary, things to say.
So naturally, it was one of the most altered chapters in the movie, which cut Spook City and its suicidal residents entirely and just had Atreyu run into Gmork on the beach. Like a lot of changes so far, such as Cairon not being a centaur, Ygramul not being around, and Uyulala's ruins being simplified to just the sphinxes being mirrored, it's understandable from a budget and time-saving perspective. Even if it means the loss of one of the coolest locations in the book. Spook City did show up in the animated series, in an episode that even had Gmork in it... albeit not the most dignified depiction of him, with how skinny his legs are to the rest of his body.
The lack of the suicide parade I can also understand, even if it does mean losing the most memorable part of Chapter 8. The movie was already pushing how dark for its demographic it could get with Artax's suicide, one of the more infamous moments in 80s fantasy movies. Trying to also put in a parade of horror monsters flagellating themselves before plunging into The Nothing would've broken the camel's already strained back (and, again, also would've strained the budget).
You might ask "So how could a children's book get away with the parade suicide scene?" That's likely due to books not being a visual medium, or mostly not visual given TNS' illustrations. Reading about something and actually seeing it on screen make for different levels of intensity. Well, that's the common assumption anyway, as I've met people who say that reading something is scarier than watching it, presumably because it leaves room for the imagination to take over.
The movie however does add a whole new scene that's arguably just as remembered as Artax drowning. Namely, the Rockbiter from the beginning shows up again and confirms The Nothing got to the other messengers. Rather than march into it like Spook City, he'll just say there and wait for The Nothing to get him, with similar despair still being communicated. The scene helped make the Rockbiter one of the movie's most memorable characters for those who grew up with it, despite his limited screentime in the movie and even less in the book.
An omission that's a little harder to look past though is how the movie simplifies Gmork's diatribe. IIRC, him saying Atreyu's whole world is fantasy and he's a dimension-hopper sent to kill Atreyu is kept, but little else. I get that a wolf monologuing a bunch would drag more in a visual medium than in text, but it means so many of the important points the book is trying to make get lost. To the point I could see it being part of (certainly not all of, but part of) the reason Michael Ende hated the movie so much, as without the extra context his message gets simplified to 'kids don't read enough'.
Also, that "If I die, I'd rather die fighting" scene? Called it, not in the book. With Gmork chained up and already dying it wouldn't fit the situation anyway. Though it's funny how it's not till Atreyu loses AURYN that he runs into someone we know for a fact doesn't care about respecting the Empress (if AURYN wasn't keeping Gmork from getting too close anyway).
Gmork
So what more does Gmork say then? Well, other than calling Atreyu 'sonny', which kinda got a chuckle from me.
His big book-only revelation is that Fantasticans can actually survive going through The Nothing... in a way. The Nothing, usually understood as the death of imagination, doesn't just erase, but turns the stories of Fantastica into real-world lies. It's recontextualised as the boundary between what we know is made up, and we don't. And lies, says Gmork, are what ignite if not cause prejudice and war, not that he's torn up about either of those. He says us humans want to destroy Fantastica, i.e. fantasy and stories, because they're not real, without realising that destroying stories doesn't stop lies, it only creates them.
Were TNS by any other author, I would take this to be about how storytelling encourages imagination, and that having a healthy imagination actually allows people to think more critically and not be easily deceived. Knowing that Ende was a teen in WW2 Germany, who got involved in the German resistance (though I don't have the best source on that) and whose father had been censored and drafted, most likely this isn't only about that. It becomes about how fascism is built on lies, yet also hates and seeks to destroy storytelling, specifically any stories that even slightly contradict fascism's own narrative.
Gmork also says he appeared as a human in our world, as he appears as a werewolf in Fantastica. And while in our world, he served as the agent of an oppressive power. Along with Adolf translating to 'wolf' and a chained wolf alluding to Fenrir from oft Nazi-appropriated Norse myth, the implication is there that Gmork was a Nazi. I highly doubt he's meant to be Hitler himself though, as from how Gmork talks, if he was a Nazi he was likely more an opportunist than a true believer (and Hitler would never say 'serve'). Not that there's any difference in practice.
"That's why I sided with the powerful and served them - because I wanted to share their power."
If Gmork's a Nazi, then it becomes very easy to interpret The Nothing as a stand-in for, if not created in-story by, Nazi censorship and anti-intellectualism. While it's highly unlikely that the real-world portions of the book are set in Nazi Germany, the late seventies did see a resurgence in Nazism. I mostly learned this from looking up the era's music, with punks wearing swastikas, Madness concerts being swarmed with Nazis, and The Dead Kennedys having to write this. Of course, many other authoritarian regimes were still very much around in 1979. And for reasons that should go without saying, The Nothing's ability to stand in for Nazi anti-intellectualism is more than relevant today.
Moving away from just the Nazi lens, Gmork may be the closest thing we've gotten to an individual, non-abstract villain so far. I say 'may' and 'closest', as what's unusual about him, especially for fantasy villains, is he's already restrained and dying by the time we properly meet him. And due to an offscreen character (Gaya the Dark Princess) we only learn about through him too. This could be seen as an anticlimax, but it is in keeping with the themes TNS has already established. Mainly, that other people have their own stories too (a narrative Nazism is none too fond of), as we saw with the messengers and Cairon being our POVs before Atreyu, rather than everything being all about the main character.
Speaking of Gaya, her name (if little else about her) and the Four Winds are more Greek myth allusions after sphinxes and an oracle. But the arguable Greek myth reference that sticks out to me the most is Atreyu introducing himself as 'Nobody' to Gmork. This is famously how Odysseus introduced himself to the Cyclops, but with him that was just covering his identity (TNS doesn't copy the whole 'Nobody is attacking me!' part). With Atreyu though, it may be as much due to a mental breakdown from loss of identity, having both lost AURYN and almost been taken by The Nothing at the parade. This identity loss really hammers in this being the low point in his Quest, that and it all going down in a city of fear.
Spook City
First off, back to the silly names again. Maybe it sounded more imposing in German, but 'Spook City' to me now sounds like a cross between Scooby Doo and a GTA game.
Anyway, despite Gmork calling it the main city of the largest country in Fantastica, Spook City is already nigh deserted by the time we get there. It's amusing how it's gone from one definition of 'ghost town' to the other, and the city abandonment due to suicide parade certainly increases the atmosphere leading up to encountering Gmork. On the other hand, it means we're introduced to this cool, gothic city then given only scant hints about what the place would normally be like. That does align with the tragedy brought by The Nothing, but also can't help but feel like a missed opportunity. Though let's just say this might not be the last we see of Spook City.
Spook City is foreshadowed in the previous chapter by Bastian thinking he's heard a ghost for a second, from where we get this line:
Maybe all the people who say ghosts don't exist are just afraid to admit that they do.
A line that also foreshadows Gmork talking about the divide between stories and lies, humans' resentment of Fantastica, and how the Fantasticans of the Land of Ghosts will become fear-inducing lies once through The Nothing. It also makes Spook City all-too-fitting a place to confront the possible Nazi Gmork, given how crucial fearmongering was to the spread of Nazism.
If we can take Gmork on his word that the Land of Ghosts was the most famous country in Fantastica, then it sounds like Ende is calling Horror the most popular genre, if it dominates the land of imagination like that. Not sure how true that is though, like yeah there are a bunch of ghost stories and haunted folklore, along with many best-selling Horror authors, but I wouldn't call it the most popular. Unless Ende's instead saying that fear makes up most of the human mind, hence why the Land of Ghosts' infamy, an argument I can at least understand.
Bastian
We get a flashback to Bastian remembering a girl, Christa, that he used to tell stories to, and how she got sent away to boarding school. To my knowledge, boarding school is thought of more fondly in Europe (or at least in Britain) as opposed to the US where it's often brought up as a punishment. Still, here we see boarding school taking away the one friend near his age that Bastian had, a friend whose name will come up again later.
We also learn Bastian liked the apple strudel Christa's mother made. While obviously apple strudel has spread beyond Germany, it's interesting this is the one bit of German culture referenced in Bastian's life so far.
I'll also tackle Chapters 10 and 11 together, with them being fairly intertwined. Chapter 12 though has enough going on with it that it may get a post all of its own. It's what inspired my first bit of TNS fanart after all.
I ended up writing this update while having a cold, which makes me prouder I was able to finish it.
By Alaexis - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2115489
A simurgh (سیمرغ, also spelled senmurv, simorgh, simorg, simurg, simoorg, simorq or simourv) is a Persian bird that is related to the phoenix that spans an area from Georgia, to Armenia, and the Byzantine Empire and other areas that were influenced by the Persian Empire.
By Unknown author - This file has been provided by the British Library from its digital collections.Catalogue entry: IOSM J.67, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31453107
The word simurgh is related to the words meaning 'the bird of Saēna', a raptor, probably an eagle, falcon, or sparrowhawk as the Sanskrit śyenaḥ (श्येनः) meaning 'bird of prey'. Though it is also closely related to the phrase sī murğ (سی مرغ) that means 'thirty birds', which was used by Sufi poet Abū Ḥāmid bin Abū Bakr Ibrāhīm (c. 1145 – c. 1221; Persian: ابوحمید بن ابوبکر ابراهیم), better known by his pen-names Farīd ud-Dīn (فریدالدین) and ʿAṭṭār of Nishapur (عطار نیشاپوری) in his The Conference of the Birds as a word play.
By Nickmard Khoey - https://www.flickr.com/photos/nickmard/2887513290/in/set-72157607483985460/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5619184
The simurgh is frequently depicted as a winged creature, large enough to carry an elephant or a whale, with the body of a peacock, head of a dog, and claws of lions. Sometimes, it has a human face. It is old enough that it 'had seen the destruction of the world three times over'. It also plunges itself into flames every 1,700 years, similar to phoenixes.
By Painting: Unknown 7th century artist.Photographer: undetermined - This file has been extracted from another file, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=95912662
They are benevolent, purifying land, bestowing fertility, mediating the union between the Earth and the sky by serving as a messenger. It lived in the Tree of Life in the middle of the world sea. When it flew away from the Tree of Life, the Tree shook so hard that it lost leaves, which became the seeds of every plant. It also expresses the divine mandate of kingship and priesthood.
By From the Sarai Albums. - http://www.ee.bilkent.edu.tr/~history/Pictures1/im16.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5760173
Abul-Qâsem Ferdowsi Tusi (940-ابوالقاسم فردوسی توسی 1019/1025), also Firdawsi or Ferdowsi (فردوسی) wrote the most famous story about the simurgh in his Shahnameh (Book of Kings). In it, a prince named Zal, son of Saam, was born albino, causing his father to cast him out, believing him to be demonic. A simurgh rescues him and raises him, teaching him wisdom as they have all knowledge. When Sal was old enough, he wanted to rejoing humanity and the simurgh and the simurgh gave him three feathers to call her should he need her help. He married a woman named Rudaba who had a difficult labor with their first child. The simurgh responded to his call for help and taught him to perform a cesarean section.
