I don't need luck

he/they. bi. half devil enjoyer and lover of the color red. Star Wars, Devil May Cry, Hellboy, and the like. Art by Bublyernie. Respect is the number 1 rule

[snizabelle]

this turian mom and her daughter are the only thing that matters to me anymore

[cipheramnesia]

Posts that just fundamentally misunderstand horror movies like The Thing, that have thousands of notes, are turning me into the joker.

[cipheramnesia]

"The thing is only acting in self defense because it gets attacked first"

The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.

You can imagine anything you want for the unknowns (before the movie starts, whether it can tell animals apart, etc), but you are fully wrong if you characterize its reception as being preemptively attacked. You can interpret things lots of ways, but saying the humans at the camp attack it first is factually wrong.

[cipheramnesia]

"None of the men know each other enough to recognize an impersonation."

The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.

There are so, so many completely reasonable ways to read ideas of social disaffectation, queerness, and more into the text of the movie without misrepresenting the factual text. I'm screaming and crying and throwing up blood, what else would everyone like to propose about horror movies that sounds great aside from being entirely spurious? Someone told me psychological thrillers are the only good horror movies an hour and a half ago, we could start there. I want people to think in these ways about horror but also talking about it in a way that depends on the the text of the film does require a certain amount of knowing the actual text of the film.

[cipheramnesia]

Actually I think this is important tags that speak to a larger idea about horror conversation:

The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.

That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.

And in a greater capacity, this is where I see things go very wrong when someone unfamiliar with or disdainful of horror tries to expound on the genre. It comes from a place of not wanting bad things to happen - not rose colored glasses or naivete - but not wanting the animal to die, not wanting the house to burn, not wanting the parents to lose a child. Not wanting to feel sick or hurt, a normal and human response to a genre which constantly steps over those lines, and quite often does so artlessly and with nothing but puerile shock at heart. That makes it difficult to examine in good faith, and wanting to see horror as something good for oneself leads most people to look for the places where horror doesn't stray close to the boundaries. Solving the problem of "bad horror" by presenting horror comedy or psychological thrillers as better side of horror, for example. But that's just another case of wanting to solve something that doesn't exist to have a solution. Part of getting the genre is recognizing not only that bad things happen in horror, but the ugly and awful and transgressive side is not a mistaken choice, not an error. It's part of what horror is, like a person, you can't understand it without understanding what you dislike along with what you like. Horror can't be corrected out of a set of flaws, those have to be accepted as part of seeing the genre as a whole.

[cipheramnesia]

Also, this isn't meant to suggest all horror is hopeless, mean, and cruel. Plent of horror is actually about having made one bad decision, having acted out of hubris, could have been solved by just talking reasonably and so forth. Those are all their own kind of horror plus loads of others. It's more that you can't fix the genre by decoding a right or wrong horror anymore than you can support an interpretation of The Thing where the base crew would have survived or mediated or so on. It's not a genre where a good version exists, because there's too much in it already which is either awful as a matter of fact like pain and death, or which is morally repugnant like racism and homophobia. It's useless to look for a way all of those things can somehow be retroactively solved. It's necessary to face all those things as a part of life. In horror, we have to acknowledge how much of it sucks (artistically) and was made by awful people and had deeply flawed examples of systemic oppression to actually like see the genre in a clear light. And similarly we also have to recognize how much of it is also necessarily transgressive in a way that cannot be anything except unpleasant, because that's part of things people find horrific. You can't have a respectable horror genre, is kinda the thing. There's too much going on, and trying to solve a flaw in like "too much gore" or "animal death" just ends up cutting off a necessary thing to the whole genre. The absolutely most bloodless zero death zero problematic element in the present day zero conflict good ending horror is still going to be uncomfortable because that's the point. Or it might suck. But lots of horror sucks, also, and sometimes that's also interesting.

[victusinveritas]

[the-lamplighter]

Persepolis

[wearepaladin]

Rest in peace, Marjane Satrapi

[calciumcryptid]

I feel like a lot of people get "All Art is Political" confused with "All Art is made with Political Intentions" which is not the same.

[samcormac]

what’s the rush?

[rainwasheseverythingaway]

The time will pass anyway

[memewhore]

[bananahomo]

I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.

dude.

$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.

[minakittengaming]

This is huge. Sharing for my US friendos.

[zillyblog]

Hospitals like to hide these policies under a lot of successive links in obscure places, so if you don't see anything right away, keep looking! Get friends to help! Make it a scavenger hunt. A game where you're assassins sent to slit capitalism's throat

[jerreeeeeee]

not every mutual fits neatly into an archetypal medievalism but there are some mutuals that im like yeah addressing you as “my liege” would come strangely naturally

[jerreeeeeee]

what mutual is prev

my liege lord

my loyal knight

my wise wizard

my evil advisor

my brother in arms

my lady muse

my wild mermaid friend

my fellow alchemist

my dashing rapscallion

my monstrous foe

Voting ended onJun 6

[monarobot]

My brother in arms @awolfstudio !

[matchagirl]

[homura]

[faiyaart]

Hot woman

[wiki-but-made-them-up]

[astercrash]

[pret-boy]

"I wish we met sooner" is such a gentle sentiment. I love you so much I not only want you in my future, but in my past too. I want to have known you when we were small stupid kids, have held hands together as we played outside. I want to have stressed out over exams together, nudging a mug of still steaming hot chocolate against your elbow to get you to focus. I want to have told you I love you before I did anyone else. I want to have held you in my arms when all those sad memories you describe to me were still fresh wounds. I want my past to have been full of you, and full of meaningful memories with you. I want my past lives to have been spent with you, whether as two lovers, or two housecats cuddling by the fireplace on a snowy day, or two flowers that just happened to bloom on the same day, next to each other. I want to have consumed your existence and intertwined it with my own since my birth, never to be separated from you for a moment. I want to have loved you throughout it all, for all time.

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

thinking about when my friend found a book from the 70s in a church office with truly some of the most insane prayers I have ever heard

[lasrina]

oh this was about someone specific

[this-site-isnt-safe-for-me]

[remakesihavetoremake-deactivate]

I know everybodys talking about the article but its this tweet itself that makes me lose my shit

[loismacgiver-deactivated2018061]

tinder link in bio.

[swoopyswish]

the replies:

[newtgeiszler]

*tapes scissors to my dick* why won’t anyone fuck me, edward scissordick?

[funnelcloudd]

[probably-crazy-writer]

I’m sobbing

[kleefkruid]

I love going trough the notes every time bc there’s always someone in the notes insisting we’re all mean and that you can just wear thick dish gloves over your fake nails as if I wouldn’t assume you’re going to Patrick Bateman my ass if you walked into the bedroom with claws and yellow rubber gloves

[ballzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz]

[ihavemace]

[bisexual-engineer-girl]

her pussy

[transfeminine-anarcho-post-egg]

OUTTA MY WAY IM BOUT TO GE- ouchie. Ouch. Ouchie.

[gigglepuffpixie]

get back here and share that with the class

[blanchebees]

Lady knight

Tip jar

[softest-punk]

i would like to hear your thoughts on the "You see it's quite simple: if they call the earth Gaia, it's fantasy. If they call it Terra, that's sci-fi" tie into greek and roman mythology please

OKAY SO.

Gaia is the Greek personification of the Earth, right, and Terra comes from Terra Mater (Mother Earth), the Roman version of essentially the same thing.

And I think we tend to view Ancient Greece as a kind of mythical fantasy place (this is fair, much of the culture of Ancient Greece the average person interacts with is fiction) vs. Rome, which is very real to the average imagination. When one thinks of Rome, one thinks of real events that actually happened (the Ides of March, the Great Fire, maybe the big fuckoff wall in England, etc.)

What I think is super interesting about that is that this is an effect of the primary technology of the Roman empire—colonisation—being so blisteringly effective that Roman mythology and their incredibly pervasive religion (and the 5D chess they were playing with it in order to facilitate the colonisation project) is pretty much invisible unless you sit down and look for it. Did you know the Romans had a god-personification of doorways (Forculus)? Now you do. And yet it's ALWAYS Romans In Space because we think of them as a real and serious imperial power vs. like, theatre nerds.

This is a shame for science fiction I think because other options include:

Space Peloponnesian League. Nice planet you got there. Sure would be a shame if anything happened to it. Have you seen our armada. Would you like to contribute to the armada, thus enlarging it, to ensure nothing unfortunate happens to your nice planet?

Space Sparta. Empire run entirely on the dominion of one single other planet with a population of perhaps 100x the legitimate citizen population. Control of said planet maintained by random acts of terrorism enacted by particularly horrible children. Bad at warfare despite putting all their time and attention into it. Deluded into thinking they're good at defence where the fact of the matter is that no one in their right mind would want their barren death planet.

Space Scythians. What home planet? Oh no they live on their ships. Yeah they just raid whatever planets they pass for supplies. They have this whole sector under an iron fist.

Space Persians. Hello new subjects we are religiously mandated to defeat chaos and also we're collecting your plants for our gardens. We have hundreds of vassal states and they're all terrified of us, for excellent reason.

and so on and so forth

Not to suggest these literally never come up in science fiction but the ratio of Romans to other possible imperial structures is way off and imho it's because Romans were such unbelievably successful colonisers that we think of them as real (and therefore reasonable fodder for science fiction) where almost all other ancient civilisations end up being used as blueprints for fantasy even though they were real too.

This isn't necessarily bad but it is an interesting pattern & the fact that it exists says a lot more than we tend to think about re: Western culture and Western cultural product as a whole.