wider than a dragon's wings

An incredibly unfocused blog.

[animentality]

[catchymemes]

[chimaerakitten]

Studying history in the Temeraire universe must get really strange once dragons are recognized as historical figures in their own right. You read about Temeraire in class. He’s one of the most important figures in the napoleonic wars and the subsequent period of reforms. The photograph of him in your textbook is a sepia toned one from the 1860s. You know intellectually that he’s still alive but you don’t really comprehend it until you catch his cameo in The Dark Knight Rises. He insisted on making an appearance because it was filmed in his captain’s childhood home. He’s playing himself. He has a four line conversation with Batman.

[thelatecaptainpierce]

While my ideal state for Margaret is her being part of the gang, I’m also a big fan of the scenes in the early seasons where Hawkeye/Trapper and Frank/Margaret give off the energy of two highly competitive married couples who regularly try to sabotage each other in the county fair’s pie baking contest.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

I cannot put into mortal words how fucking badly I want that swedish goat to burn. We live in a modern surveillance hellscape and not only is big brother watching you but he’s monitoring your purchase habits so he can sell you a smart refrigerator that will spy on you for the cia. the full weight of modern technology can be rallied to protect that straw monument to human hubris and I want us to burn it anyway. I want the might of modern society to crumple in the face of a drunk swede with a zippo lighter. we can do it just take my hand

[theyeargame]

What do you most associate with the year 1989

Fall of the Berlin Wall

Birth of Taylor Swift/title of one of her albums

Ronald Reagan leaving office

Last season of Classic Doctor Who

Heathers movie

Society movie

Demonstrations in Tienanmen Square

Something else (say in tags)

Voting ended onDec 18, 2023

[contagiousgrace]

it's not that I need a quiet day or a day off exactly; it's that I need a pocket of time that exists entirely outside of linear time as we know it that would allow me to get things done without time passing in the real world, and frankly, I don't think that's too much to ask.

[theswampghost]

i hate this weird trend in fandom where subtext is seen as a Bad Thing and is only done if the creators are too cowardly to commit to showing something. i hate to break it to you but nuance and layers are what make stories interesting, if you have no subtext then you have a very flat story

[theswampghost]

sometimes things are subtext because they don’t quite fit the tone of the story, or because the story isn’t about that (and if they showed it outright they would have to take time to explore it), or sometimes the characters aren’t ready to face it, or sometimes subtext is just the right choice for this specific story, or SOMETIMES it’s just fun and interesting to have underlying themes and implications!!!!

[theswampghost]

also just because it’s subtext doesn’t mean it’s not deliberate or not meant to be part of the story. “well if they WANTED it to be canon they should’ve SAID SO” some of us can understand implications. some of us enjoy thinking about the media we consume and don’t just want everything handed to us on a silver platter. “wow i can’t believe the writers didn’t even realize what this implies” im going to beat you to death with hammers

[wizzard890]

okay so picture this.

You're a man named Jim Steinman. You are one of the most prolific songwriters of the 80s. In your spirit, output and essence, you are eternally popping a wheelie on a motorcycle while a hot half-naked woman clings to you and bats wheel in the sky above.

You wrote a song in which Meatloaf plays a hideously disfigured hunk who steals a nubile lady back to his crumbling manor and introduces her to the pleasures of magic lesbian group sex.

You wrote a song in which Celine Dion sings as Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, dancing with Cathy's corpse on a beach in the moonlight; a scene which you, Jim Steinman, believe should have been in the book. (The moors of Wuthering Heights are landlocked, but you, Jim Steinman, are too fucking real to care about that.)

You wrote the song for the opening scene of the movie Streets of Fire, in which evil leatherdaddy Willem Dafoe leads his malefic motorcycle crew into a concert to abduct Diane Lane while she's wearing a skintight satin jumpsuit.

You wrote a song in which Bonnie Tyler wanders a haunted boarding school as literal demon twinks gyrate at her out of the fog.

There is no peak of goth camp that you, Jim Steinman, have not summited, no horny energy you have not tapped. They say that Alexander the Great wept when he saw there were no more worlds to conquer. But you, Jim Steinman, are not Alexander the Great. You, Jim Steinman, are better. You, Jim Steinman, have vision.

You take your most successful song, the song everyone knows, the most big-haired, white dress, gothic arches, doves flying, possessed choir boys chanting, bombastic song you have, and think: what if this, but with vampires.

And so you change the lyrics to be about death and infinity and a powerful bloodsucking lord seducing a girl who is ALL ABOUT IT, and then toss off a whole musical for this song to be the centerpiece to, and the musical is bad but it's also a weird hit that's been staged in fourteen countries and revived seven times, because nothing has ever whipped as campily, as ridiculously, as perfectly as this:

It never takes off in America. A prophet is without honor in his own land. But that doesn't matter. How could it matter? You are perhaps the most creatively self-actualized man who has ever lived. Look at that vampire. He's coming in hot and a hundred Venetian nuns gave their lives to make his ludicrously capacious lace sleeves. Look at that girl. She was born in a fog machine. She wore her best red velvet cape. She's down bad. She's singing Total Eclipse of the Heart the whole time.

You are Jim Steinman, and you have reached apotheosis.

[bibliophile1887]

[yaggol-deactivated20150816]

FUCK YES

[saiyanheretic]

There’s ‘black comedy’ and then there’s M*A*S*H.

[randomgifgirl]

always reblog MASH, it deserves more on tumblr

[poni1kenobi-deactivated20250915]

Always reblog War is war and hell is hell

[keeper-of-the-flames]

Fun fact, the DVD box sets have an option turn off the laugh track and it makes it a much more somber and enlightening social commentary. Cause it may be set in the Korean War, but it’s really about the Vietnam War.

[chronicintrovert]

i can't do this anymore! i mean i can, and i will, obviously. but i can't fucking do this anymore!

[centrally-unplanned]

Area Man Who Has "Had Enough" Wakes Up Next Morning at 6:30 AM to Commute to Work Again

[hayaomiyazaki]

Glen Hansard and Lisa O'Neill perform "Fairytale of New York" at the close of the funeral of Shane MacGowan, the 8th of December 2023.

[dduane]

I can't remember who said it in the press over here, but it was along the lines of "I can't remember ever being at a funeral before where people danced in the aisles." ...You'll see it in about the last minute of the video.

[thekanucklehead-deactivated2025]

This one time I ate so much salmon I could barely move, and then my mom was like oh have some blueberry pie for desert, and in that moment I understood what it is like to be a grizzly bear

[chimaerakitten]

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.

[jupitermelichios]

I hope you don't mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc

and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.

this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told

when that's just not true.

the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.

there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.

there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.

there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.

Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.

Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.

Fanfic isn't a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn't a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.

[hockpock]

ADHD time blindness be like "oh, today is the 30th? that's fine, December is still next month, that's forever away!

...what do you mean tommorrow?"

[hockpock]

happy 1 year anniversary to this post,

DECEMBER IS TOMMORROW.

AGAIN.

[airprime7]

YES, WE HAVE DECEMBER TOMORROW

[inkskinned]

the thing about art is that it was always supposed to be about us, about the human-ness of us, the impossible and beautiful reality that we (for centuries) have stood still, transfixed by music. that we can close our eyes and cry about the same book passage; the events of which aren't real and never happened. theatre in shakespeare's time was as real as it is now; we all laugh at the same cue (pursued by bear), separated hundreds of years apart.

three years ago my housemates were jamming outdoors, just messing around with their instruments, mostly just making noise. our neighbors - shy, cautious, a little sheepish - sat down and started playing. i don't really know how it happened; i was somehow in charge of dancing, barefoot and laughing - but i looked up, and our yard was full of people. kids stacked on the shoulders of parents. old couples holding hands. someone had brought sidewalk chalk; our front walk became a riot of color. someone ran in with a flute and played the most astounding solo i've ever heard in my life, upright and wiggling, skipping as she did so. she only paused because the violin player was kicking his heels up and she was laughing too hard to continue.

two weeks ago my friend and i met in the basement of her apartment complex so she could work out a piece of choreography. we have a language barrier - i'm not as good at ASL as i'd like to be (i'm still learning!) so we communicate mostly through the notes app and this strange secret language of dancers - we have the same movement vocabulary. the two of us cracking jokes at each other, giggling. there were kids in the basement too, who had been playing soccer until we took up the far corner of the room. one by one they made their slow way over like feral cats - they laid down, belly-flat against the floor, just watching. my friend and i were not in tutus - we were in slouchy shirts and leggings and socks. nothing fancy. but when i asked the kids would you like to dance too? they were immediately on their feet and spinning. i love when people dance with abandon, the wild and leggy fervor of childhood. i think it is gorgeous.

their adults showed up eventually, and a few of them said hey, let's not bother the nice ladies. but they weren't bothering us, they were just having fun - so. a few of the adults started dancing awkwardly along, and then most of the adults. someone brought down a better sound system. someone opened a watermelon and started handing out slices. it was 8 PM on a tuesday and nothing about that day was particularly special; we might as well party.

one time i hosted a free "paint along party" and about 20 adults worked quietly while i taught them how to paint nessie. one time i taught community dance classes and so many people showed up we had to move the whole thing outside. we used chairs and coatracks to balance. one time i showed up to a random band playing in a random location, and the whole thing got packed so quickly we had to open every door and window in the place.

i don't think i can tell you how much people want to be making art and engaging with art. they want to, desperately. so many people would be stunning artists, but they are lied to and told from a very young age that art only matters if it is planned, purposeful, beautiful. that if you have an idea, you need to be able to express it perfectly. this is not true. you don't get only 1 chance to communicate. you can spend a lifetime trying to display exactly 1 thing you can never quite language. you can just express the "!!??!!!"-ing-ness of being alive; that is something none of us really have a full grasp on creating. and even when we can't make what we want - god, it feels fucking good to try. and even just enjoying other artists - art inherently rewards the act of participating.

i wasn't raised wealthy. whenever i make a post about art, someone inevitably says something along the lines of well some of us aren't that lucky. i am not lucky; i am dedicated. i have a chronic condition, my hands are constantly in pain. i am not neurotypical, nor was i raised safe. i worked 5-7 jobs while some of these memories happened. i chose art because it mattered to me more than anything on this fucking planet - i would work 80 hours a week just so i could afford to write in 3 of them.

and i am still telling you - if you are called to make art, you are called to the part of you that is human. you do not have to be good at it. you do not have to have enormous amounts of privilege. you can just... give yourself permission. you can just say i'm going to make something now and then - go out and make it. raquel it won't be good though that is okay, i don't make good things every time either. besides. who decides what good even is?

you weren't called to make something because you wanted it to be good, you were called to make something because it is a basic instinct. you were taught to judge its worth and over-value perfection. you are doing something impossible. a god's ability: from nothing springs creation.

a few months ago i found a piece of sidewalk chalk and started drawing. within an hour i had somehow collected a small classroom of young children. their adults often brought their own chalk. i looked up and about fifteen families had joined me from around the block. we drew scrangly unicorns and messed up flowers and one girl asked me to draw charizard. i am not good at drawing. i basically drew an orb with wings. you would have thought i drew her the mona lisa. she dragged her mother over and pointed and said look! look what she drew for me and, in the moment, i admit i flinched (sorry, i don't -). but the mother just grinned at me. he's beautiful. and then she sat down and started drawing.

someone took a picture of it. it was in the local newspaper. the summary underneath said joyful and spontaneous artwork from local artists springs up in public gallery. in the picture, a little girl covered in chalk dust has her head thrown back, delighted. laughing.

[thewintersoldier]

M*A*S*H (1972–1983) - 3.13 • “Mad Dogs and Servicemen”