[courteous]

ENVY 23&white west asian ☪︎. margarita nikolayevna replica; myopic but sensitive; difficult and gloomy. you who read me, are you sure you understand my language?

opinionated & an enemy of bourgeois thinking in every category. anti-psychiatry & abolitionist. i am part of the power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good; i am the tragic plaything of fate. i care abt the work of mikhail bulgakov and vladimir mayakovsky, and various classics of antiquity. i am fond of the labyrinth, the robot, the machine, the monster, the house, anything resembling a greek tragedy, and gardens of forking paths

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[courteous]

ill quit my yapping youre free for now

[courteous]

bc thats all a story abt or that features sexual violence can be lol. bc theres never anything worthwhile to say abt women (“with weapons”) who are subject to sexual violence other than “and then they killed their assaulter” lol. bc even if that is the story thats just boring and not chic enough for our zine, which has more aesthetic concerns

[courteous]

hi.. friends and friends of friends. ive made a google form of questions about preferences, practices, habits, &c that in some way shape or form have to do w literature and w reading. if youd like i would be delighted to see your responses. this is solely for my own entertainment and to satiate curiosity. the data will not be used for anything. none of the questions are required; answer only the ones you want to. i may add questions later because i always forget things but dont worry about that.

here it is if you want to participate in my experiment.

[courteous]

no telling when this will be ready but i am working on a companion to my broader literature google form that focuses on monsters & houses (haunted or not) #staytuned

[courteous]

we do need intersectional readings of the monster. i like your queer interpretation but there is more. like its not even worth phrasing this as a "might there be more to it?" because there absolutely 1000% is

[ndnbutch]

but if I were to say that I don’t think vampires inherently and universally represent queerness and that if that’s the only way you engage with any story containing a vampire then a lot of very important messages are going to go straight over your head? i would be killed to death.

[shelterwoodpod]

ESPECIALLY an issue when vampires very explicitly represent fear of outsider immigrant non-white invaders! Dracula can absolutely be read with a queer lens but we cannot let our desire for ~spooky gay stuff~ blind us to the very real xenophobia, antisemitism, and orientalism present in a LOT of the foundational media in vampire history! nor the racism present in modern vampire stories!!!

[folkdances]

happy august and HAPPY WITMONTH!

did you know that only 36% of translated books are from non-european countries? wit wants to help change that! women in translation month has been taking place every august since 2014. it's an event that encourages people to branch out and read as many non-english books written (and translated!) by women as they possibly can, so this august, head over to your local library/bookstore and read some translated lit! ^_^ rope your friends into doing it with you while you're at it — you'll have fun, discover some incredible books, and participate in an important cause all at once

[courteous]

we do need intersectional readings of the monster. i like your queer interpretation but there is more. like its not even worth phrasing this as a "might there be more to it?" because there absolutely 1000% is

[funeral]

Dale Bailey, American Nightmares: The Haunted House Formula in American Popular Fiction

[gabriestat]

[gougeddoll]

[courteous]

your weirdly cryptic queue tag has failed to entertain the council

[necromancerka]

turning everyone into lesbians is дороже родины to me

[courteous]

...playful ambiguity carries over from traditional narratives to literary adaptations and imitations of them—that is, to modern, myth-based fantasy. Riddles and fairy tales are not myths, but they share with myth a complex perspective on meaning: in all of these oral forms, any object can take on unexpected significance, usually coded as magic, as the story surrounding it begins to generate meanings beyond the literal. Some images are almost impossible to separate from their mythic avatars: doves, flames, drops of blood. Others are unlikely bearers of metaphoric weight and yet in the right narrative frame, they begin to whisper oracularly and to offer glimpses of the numinous: a handful of pomegranate seeds in the story of Persephone, a spider's web in Navajo creation stories.

In that sense, all myths are also riddles, to which the answers are (depending on the seeker's questions) God, spirit, the universe, fate, ourselves. Riddles, in turn, are games, but they are games that can suddenly grow terrifyingly portentous. A number of fantasies incorporate traditional riddles and riddling ballads. Examples include The Hobbit (1937), with the riddling contest between Bilbo and Gollum; Ellen Kusner's Thomas the Rhymer (1990), in which the protagonist must solve ballads such as "The Famous Flower of Servingmen" and "The Unquiet Grave" as if they were riddles about his own experience; Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock (1984), which challenges the reader with metaphoric connections between the heroine's life and the ballads of "Tam Lin" and "Thomas the Rhymer"; and Edward Fenton's children's fantasy The Nine Questions (1959), which takes its situation and structure from the first two ballads in Francis James Child's authoritative collection, "Riddles Wisely Expounded," and "The Elfin Knight." That last example (a lovely book, sadly forgotten) demonstrates that not only are the first two of my forms of fantastic truth, myth and metaphor, closely related, but the third, structure, is as well. Each of Fenton's chapters is modeled after a verse of the ballad; each verse poses a riddle; the final riddle unlocks the meaning of all.

— Brian Attebery, Fantasy: How It Works

[courteous]

this has zero coherence because i am mostly just spitballing here but childrens media is often childrens media because that is the primary audience that is in mind when it is made, and with that audience in mind the way people write about the troubles of the world, the way themes are presented (usually easier to grasp), &c. are affected by that. (there is also the fact that many of these are tools for socialization and devices to transmit lessons on what is moral, what is ethical, and what is normal... though, doesnt most media try to do the same?) in literature we see simpler language to match the language skills we imagine a certain age group likely has at that point in their lives, and we see more visuals; in film/tv we see vivid imagery and colors that pop so as to maintain attention; difficult realities are treated with a greater gentleness; etc.. but i do not think there is something fundamentally different about media that is for a child versus media that is for us, in the sense that ultimately they all engage with the building blocks of story. much of the motifs that we think of as childrens story motifs are replicated and very much cornerstone in stories intended for adults. pans labyrinth plays w the image of a magical realm that is an escape from the family structure & house, which is a very very familiar overture, but it is also overtly 'scary' and portrays violence w a candid air that will have us classify it as unfit for a child to watch - though that depends on the childs age.

[courteous]

a mutual made a post abt this a few days ago but the whole "this may look like childrens media but its actually secretly for adults" thing is odd to me because childrens media does have like themes and interesting stories to tell. they wont be the same as what is intended for mature audiences but a childrens tv show isnt automatically devoid of any meaning bc its intended for children & if it does have meaning its #actuallyforadults thats just not how all that works. there are ppl who study childrens literature for research purposes you know

[courteous]

it may be of more interest and intrigue to consider what types of stories we consider to be "for children" and what we consider to be unfit for them, and to think about how these considerations are decisions made by adults who are, to quote tolkien, "often much mistaken" in their judgments on the matter

[courteous]

I will now turn to children, and so come to the last and most important of the three questions: what, if any, are the values and functions of fairy-stories now? It is usually assumed that children are the natural or the specially appropriate audience for fairy-stories. In describing a fairy-story which they think adults might possibly for their own entertainment, reviewers frequently indulge in such waggeries as: 'this book is for children from the ages of six to sixty'. But I have never yet seen the puff of a new motor-model that began thus: 'this toy will amuse infants from seventeen to seventy'; though that to my mind would be much more appropriate. Is there any essential connection between children and fairy-stories? Is there any call for comment, if an adult reads them for himself? Reads them as tales, that is, not studies them as curios. Adults are allowed to collect and study anything, even old theatre programmes or paper bags.

Among those who still have enough wisdom to not think fairy-stories pernicious, the common opinion seems to be that there is a natural connection between the minds of children and fairy-stories, of the same order as the connection between children's bodies and milk. I think this is an error; at best an error of false sentiment, and one that is therefore most often made by those who, for whatever private reason (such as childishness), tend to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large.

— J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories"