Game of Thrones Daily
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Cookie Run:Kingdom Official!
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ojovivo
KIROKAZE
if i look back, i am lost
$LAYYYTER
Andulka
cherry valley forever
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Not today Justin
Claire Keane
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
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bliss lane
#extradirty
oozey mess
occasionally subtle
Cosmic Funnies
seen from Iraq
seen from Vietnam
seen from Germany
seen from Albania
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Indonesia
seen from Australia
seen from Mexico
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from Venezuela
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh
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seen from United States
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seen from United States
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@cursed-appleblood
villain character who has a last minute change of heart and sacrifices their life to defeat an even bigger bad but it entirely does not land as a redemption with the heroes. the heroes are just like "oh hell yeah two birds with one stone. thank fucking god i really didnt wanna have to deal with that guy anymore. good riddance."
i like when a piece of media says that an all-powerful character "sees humans as insects" because that really could mean a lot of things. maybe they view us as insignifigant and will squish us under their boot. maybe theyre actually studying and cataloguing us for their thesis paper. maybe theyre campaigning for human protection because we're an important part of their ecosystem. maybe they see a human and go "ew ew ewwwwww someone get the cup and get that FREAK out of my house." .
Never Learned - Gator Days
i’m printing this out and i’m putting it on the mirror so i can confront myself with it
girl, your competition isn’t other people
it’s your bad habits ⋆ your distractions ⋆ your insecurities ⋆ your lack of discipline ⋆ your procrastination ⋆ your ego ⋆ your fears ⋆ your broken routine ⋆ your addictions ⋆ the person you don't want to be anymore
Quote of the day
I’m seeing a lot of people saying this post changed their brain chemistry, and as a neuroscientist I wanted to say yes!!! Yes it does!
Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.
If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.
Let your likes guide you.
(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)
Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psych
The Clone Sage Killed Spider-Man, and Marvel Comics let it.
Having just now finished the entire original run of The Amazing Spider-Man. I think I have pinpointed the moment. The exact INSTANT that Spider-Man as a story, an evolving tale about Peter Parker and his grappling with great power and great responsibility, his loves and loses, his valleys and triumphs. Died.
And here it is
Because make no mistake, for the first three decades of this comic. I saw it. I saw why Peter Parker became and has remained one of the most famous and beloved fictional characters in the world. Starting out as a kid who thinks the whole world is easily understood, only to get kicked in the stomach by life when it reaches its dirty fingers into his peace and pulls it apart. Having to pick himself up after trauma, battle to find what responsibility even IS in a world that only gets more complicated and untrustworthy as you get older. Having to find the people that matter, having to find the places to draw his lines in the sand.
Finding love, and happiness, and peace, and GROWTH as the world throws him blow after blow. It's inspired. It's dynamic. It keeps you guessing. The best soap opera ever written as we see this young man and the people he loves drag every ounce of happiness they can find out of hell with their teeth.
And then. They chickened out.
The fanboyism seeped in. The nostalgia seeped in. You bet your ASS the misogyny seeped in. Suddenly writers saw Mary Jane not as an asset to storytelling, as a partner and confidante who could carry her own emotions. But as a wet blanket nag that got in the way of Peter's adventuring. The idea of his science career stumbled and shattered over and over again. May Parker finally having to move on, one more price exacted from Peter in a world he could not control was raised from the dead so that Peter could nestle right back in under her shadow like a man refusing to move out his parents' basement.
Writers took Peter Parker, a character who had never grown moss, who had never stayed in the same place for 3 issues in a row. And they nailed his feet to the floor. More than that they started to DRAG him backwards. Never to roam far from the Daily Bugle, from his Aunt May's house, from the terrible dirge of being a go nowhere, do nothing Spider-Man. Ben Reilly, a character whose story salvaged from the Clone Saga would have given Spider-Man his own Nightwing. A perfect COMPLIMENT to Peter's story to give an outlet to all those adolescent "dreams" was buried so that they could enforce the status quo on Peter instead because so long as nothing CHANGES then no one in the writer's chair could POSSIBLY get spooked by having to imagine what a stable man with a family, a heart and a brain might do in Peter's shoes.
And now the cycle is never ending. A skipping record that no one dares to reset. Every six months they retcon, they reboot, they rob, they bring characters back just to traumatize and brutalize them because Peter Parker is never allowed a moment's peace. The baptisms of fire that unlocked the gates into the next steps of his journey being replaced by a purgatory where the suffering remains but all possible gates are closed, locked and barred.
I saw it. I saw what we could have had. I can't even IMAGINE where we could be standing now, 30 years on if the next steps had continued to come. But I saw its outline, like a shadow against the dawn. I saw the light in front of us, felt it graze our fingertips. And then saw it snatched from us by creators and businessmen too cowardly to rock the boat out of the muddy rut we can all see it sinking in.
Maybe one day someone will break that chain. Put the wedding band back on his finger and the baby girl back in his arms.
As of this moment. I'd have choked if I was still holding my breath.
Let's hope the next story we read from the House of Ideas has a happier ending.
I don't think I could have put it any better. There's real, genuine forward movement for much of Peter's life. He graduates high school, he goes to college, he moves out of Aunt May's house, he makes new friends and puts high school grudges behind him, he graduates college, he starts graduate school, he dates and has all kinds of relationships with their ups and downs, he experiences near bottom of the barrel poverty, he experiences moments of sweet success, he gets married, he loses people, he finds a brother, and he weathers all manner of tragedies, and more.
And then they decide that Peter is no longer allowed to grow any further. That the secret to Spider-Man's success as a property is that, as a character, he can never be allowed to be successful or happy. That he must constantly be letting everyone else in his life down.
As someone who's dipped in and out of Spider-Man over the years, I'll say that he does have some moments in the intervening years, but One More Day, when Quesada finally wins out in his goal to fully drag Pete back (after both a separation from and a false death of MJ), is the real end of him. But it might as well have been a slow lingering death and now they're propping his zombie corpse up.
Because Peter is great. He's all of us. He's the little guy who knows he's probably gonna get his ass kicked, but can't look away if he knows he can do something, no matter the personal cost to himself. He's the guy, like so many of us, with so much potential, but just can't catch a break. He's the guy who's found a grove in life, even if it wasn't what people expected of him.
Peter's no longer someone to identify with.
He's just sad.
And that's the real tragedy of it all.
I will never not take it as a personal insult that Quesada didn't think comic fans could identify with a man GROWING in life.
As one who 1.) grew up reading Spider-Man a few years before the Clone Saga, and 2.) hasn’t been able to follow Spidey comics since Quesada pushed OMD and the Slott era onward, I am stunned by these observations.
I think OP is absolutely right, it was just in ways I couldn’t notice at the time. It’s only now, knowing in hindsight what the long-term interests were for many at Marvel, that I can realize that the downfall of Spider-Man wasn’t OMD. This was the start.
In refreshing my memories of this era, I hadn’t realized that editor Tom Brevoort—despite overseeing and defending the post-OMD era of Slott’s run—actually fought against Marvel’s wishes to have MJ lose the baby in a different story a couple years earlier! So that particular arc was left unfinished while Marvel waited for someone else to come along who’d be willing to do the dirty work. Quesada was still just a working (if popular) artist at this point, so Marvel’s plans to revert Peter to some endless, meaningless status quo were in the works long before Joe became EiC.
In fact, I think it was a one-two punch of MJ losing the baby and the return of Norman Osborn. Retconning Norman’s death and turning him from a chaotic evil villain into a scheming ultimate mastermind in the style of Wilson Fisk and Lex Luthor set the tone for Peter being in an endless Batman/Joker dance with a singular arch-nemesis, while ruining comics’ most consequential death of a villain.
Several writers embraced the chance to go back to “proper” status quo before the Clone Saga fiasco, doing their best to ignore that it ever happened. But in so doing, they didn’t build on the soap opera saga, and one way or another, they told increasingly regressive stories that felt disconnected from one another, just like how so many other long-running comics like Batman have been.
Some other writers tried to heal the wounds from this story. There are two writers who made me love Mary Jane as a rich character in her own right: Gerry Conway and JM DeMatteis, and the latter did his very best to try salvaging the baby’s loss by putting the focus back on MJ. He wrote an absolutely lovely issue of MJ mourning and reconnecting with Peter, but the damage was already done. There was no going back. Even when JMS’ run reunited Peter and MJ and gave us the last great period of their time together, it was doomed because Quesada had taken charge and was ready to do what many at Marvel already had wanted for at least one decade, if not two.
I just never realized the fatal wound was delivered here, with MJ losing the baby, and how it was directly tied into the return of Norman. And it’s especially sobering because (depressingly) I think it would have happened no matter what, sooner or later.
It’s honestly incredible to realize that Peter got to have thirty-five-ish years of growth and character development, with deaths and consequences that largely stuck, and where changes mostly mattered. Marvel was better at this than DC, but that’s because most of their characters weren’t yet considered viable IP for movies and TV. Spider-Man was their biggest exception, and even he got to have a continuous arc for a long, long time.
It couldn’t have lasted, especially once a new generation started getting into Spider-Man through a movie that introduced him as a high schooler and bachelor. I do NOT agree with Quesada et al about that being the “right” status quo for Peter, but I also can’t help but think about how many people here only ever think about Peter as Tom Holland’s version. That’s the IP that Marvel has wanted, not the version that was built and developed across decades. And maybe that old version is too inaccessible with all its canon, but damn, that’s still what I miss when I think about Spider-Man.
Great post, OP. Really makes me feel a whole lot of ways.
I think those fancomics where Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes is transgender are cute and fun but I also think it's a deep misunderstanding of Calvin's character to think he would transition into a heterosexual normie who goes to her high school reunion. That girl would have neopronouns and fang implants
Adult Calvin is a tattoo artist named Panthera who is the bassist in a terrible metal band called Captain Napalm and Hobbes helps do faer E injections
I know it's like 2 weeks too late to change it but I'm so mad I didn't realize that the band would obviously be called "Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS". I walk the road of shame
@madnessbrainworms pointing at you
repeating this to myself as a list of daily affirmations
Emily Wison, whose translation formed the basis for Nolan's version of The Odyssey, is brutal and unrelenting in her review of it.
As they say at the awards shows, I was humbled to learn that Christopher Nolan has read at least the first line of my...
John and Yoko looking like lesbians
John Lennon, Yoko Ono in interview at Kenwood (1968) Photographer: Susan Wood Source: susanwood.com
If THE modern translator of the OG Odyssey text wrote this about my film adaptation I’d kill myself
Emily Wilson you’re goated
[image transcript: Nolan's Odyssey lacks many of the elements that make the poem great. It has nothing convincing to say about time, memory, history, war, or about the relationship between one warrior's glorious return and the lives of his family, adversaries, comrades, friends and neighbours. It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters have convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible. /End image transcript]
I strongly recommend checking out the full article linked by OP, this isn't even as brutal as Wilson gets.
