yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine

[persephonesidekick]

The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.

[runecestershire]

[runecestershire]

So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.

Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.

Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.

That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.

[motherfuckingshakespeare]

I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop

[daimonie]

i met a scholar once who said that tragedies aren’t about a silly “flaw” or anything, it’s about having a hero who’s just in the wrong goddamn story

if hamlet swapped places with othello he wouldn’t be duped by any of iago’s shit, he’d sit down & have a good think & actually examine the facts before taking action. meanwhile in denmark, othello would have killed claudius before act 2 could even start. but instead nope, they’re both in situations where their greatest strengths are totally useless and now we’ve got all these bodies to bury.

[whopooh]

The tropes are hungry and the hero is in the wrong goddamn story.

I love this post.

[haunted-hideaway]

Feels

[vr-trakowski]

I believe the artist is Katy Doughty.  

[modmad]

Here’s a link to Katy’s tumblr!

[saltforge]

This is half an MFA right here.

The tropes are always hungry and the tragic hero is just somebody trapped in the wrong damn story.

[noxelementalist]

“The tropes are always hungry and the hero is trapped in the wrong story.” is a phrase I want made into a gorgeously designed giant poster I can hang on the wall.

[dignitywhatdignity]

@shitpostsampler

[shitpostsampler]

[fandomcen]

[radiofreederry]

[sexhaver]

that Brian Eno quote about how whatever you find most repulsive about a medium (film grain, record scratches/fuzz, CDs skipping) will be the first thing you try and emulate once that medium is obsolete because it's "the sign of a moment too powerful for the medium assigned to contain it".... man.......

[funkylilpunk]

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” -Brian Eno

[fictionadventurer]

Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.

[disgruntled-foreign-patriarch]

this is the best analysis of It's a Wonderful Life I've yet read.

[catchymemes]

[falloutgayaf]

If shitting is legal why do you still lock the stall door?

[brave-faces-everyone-deactivate]

I am just not feeling it today besties. Let’s all skip work and go get coffee and browse a bookstore and record store.

[jessebloom]

i do have to hand it to him

[cosmicretreat]

[wanderingthunderstorm]

[Image description: an Instagram post from Dennis McDonald:

Imagine I loaned you $100 and said I would charge $1 per day in interest until the balance was repaid. After 300 days you have not paid me anything so you now owe me $400. Now imagine I say, since I'm such a nice guy, I will forgive $100 of your debt so you only owe me $300 (and the interest continues). Do you get that this wouldn't actually cost me any money? I'm not actually spending another $100. I'm just erasing money that never actually existed.

That's how this student loan forgiveness works. It's not actually costing anyone any money. Your taxes are not paying for this because no one is actually spending any money. The amount of debt being forgiven is less than the amount of debt that was created by capitalized interest on the original loans.

/end ID]

[thedreadvampy]

male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.

[thebeanestbad]

broke: midsommar is a girl power movie

woke: midsommar is a horrifying movie about a manipulative cult

bespoke: midsommar is a litmus test to tell how easily you could be indoctrinated into a cult and if your first thought after watching it is that it was a girl power movie you’re very susceptible to cult tactics and you should be aware of that

[thebeanestbad]

you’re the only person who’s allowed to reply to this post anymore

[persimnon]

HELP

[huffylemon]

damn ok lake superior

[songsofwaterandnight]

Ok yeah that lake is superior

[samuraifuckingfrog]

[thedragonoftelevision]

I finally watched The Sound of Music and like I get it now, I get it. 

It’s a beautiful two hour love story of a strict man finally opening his heart again and then a fifty minute public service announcement to hate the nazis. Brilliant.

[yomikoreadsbooks]

You’re not wrong there…

[allthefandomss]

Reblogging this version cuz those two gifs show the sexiest duality a man can have.

[jonlybonlyfromboldlygo]

2 things a man should do

Look at me like he can’t believe I exist

Hate nazis

[acapelladitty]

met a women today and she was like “i’m mrs smith, soon to be mrs johnstone” and I was like “aww, that’s lovely! are ye gettin’ married?” and without blinking she hit back with “nah i’m divorcing the cunt” a legend tbh

[shounenchild]

Funniest character creation of all time goes to when the first co-creator of Kim Possible said "Kim Possible. She can do anything." out loud in an elevator and the second one immediately replied with "Ron Stoppable. He can't."

[shounenchild]

Disney paired up two of their most successful content developers and ordered them to craft a story that would be interesting to an ambitiously diverse age group

and the result was these two guys turning around and inventing girlboss x malewife in 2002