failing upwards

18+ | she/they | mimi

[diphowell]

"I don't think I need to forgive you."

[slavery]

[macbethz]

Fuck I’m at a fencing tournament and literally a minute after I reblogged this my dad told me that he talked to the point people and I’m probably going to win a medal.

[seananmcguire]

BURN BAGEL BURN

[gothiccharmschool]

OH WHY NOT?

[harukami]

I need to follow up to say I reblogged this last night, and this morning I got some of the best news of my life, like, a life dream come true news thing.

Bagel what are your powers

[acabosetotal]

FUCK, I though it was just another lucky meme but LISTEN. Since a week ago I was waiting a phone call to confirm me if I got a job or not in my university. I reblogged this yesterday’s night “just for fun and because I don’t want any bagel to be mad with me”, and today’s afternoon, while I was losing my time as always, the professor I was supposed to work with called me and asked me for my personal information to start working with her.

THE BAGEL POWERS ARE WAY TOO MUCH FOR THIS WORLD

[token-white-friend]

I GOT A JOB THE DAY AFTER MY QUEUE POSTED THIS THE FIRST TIME AND I JUST REALIZED IT WHEN I SAW IT AGAIN HOLY GOD

[noodle-dragon]

The bagel hasn’t let me down yet!

[blackcatgodess]

I got a job offer after reblogging the bagel. Believe in the bagel!

[anayely420]

🙏🏼

[sonsfantasies]

Worth a try lol

[theblizzardsix]

i could use some good news or even a good girl 

[pantspooplover]

Go lil bagle! Show me your power!

[itaachiyama-moved]

Okii then!

[blastlight]

THIS IS THE FIRST THING ON MY BLOG

I GOT ASKED OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME AFTER I REBLOGGED IT

[decadentstrangernacho]

Ugh I hate superstitions… … not that it stops me, of course

[golden-moonchild]

wait the job i interviewed at called me back saying i got accepted…i’m sorry i didn’t fully believe in your power magic bagel

[slavery]

[macbethz]

Fuck I’m at a fencing tournament and literally a minute after I reblogged this my dad told me that he talked to the point people and I’m probably going to win a medal.

[seananmcguire]

BURN BAGEL BURN

[gothiccharmschool]

OH WHY NOT?

[harukami]

I need to follow up to say I reblogged this last night, and this morning I got some of the best news of my life, like, a life dream come true news thing.

Bagel what are your powers

[acabosetotal]

FUCK, I though it was just another lucky meme but LISTEN. Since a week ago I was waiting a phone call to confirm me if I got a job or not in my university. I reblogged this yesterday’s night “just for fun and because I don’t want any bagel to be mad with me”, and today’s afternoon, while I was losing my time as always, the professor I was supposed to work with called me and asked me for my personal information to start working with her.

THE BAGEL POWERS ARE WAY TOO MUCH FOR THIS WORLD

[token-white-friend]

I GOT A JOB THE DAY AFTER MY QUEUE POSTED THIS THE FIRST TIME AND I JUST REALIZED IT WHEN I SAW IT AGAIN HOLY GOD

[noodle-dragon]

The bagel hasn’t let me down yet!

[blackcatgodess]

I got a job offer after reblogging the bagel. Believe in the bagel!

[anayely420]

🙏🏼

[sonsfantasies]

Worth a try lol

[theblizzardsix]

i could use some good news or even a good girl 

[pantspooplover]

Go lil bagle! Show me your power!

[itaachiyama-moved]

Okii then!

[blastlight]

THIS IS THE FIRST THING ON MY BLOG

I GOT ASKED OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME AFTER I REBLOGGED IT

[decadentstrangernacho]

Ugh I hate superstitions… … not that it stops me, of course

[conschintz]

the ravening war pcs + text posts

[conschintz]

the ravening war pcs + text posts

[rubyleaf]

You know, when I see fictional characters who repress all their emotions, they're usually aloof and very blunt about keeping people at a distance, sometimes to an edgy degree—but what I don't see nearly enough are the emotionally repressed characters who are just…mellow.

Think about it. In real life, the person that's bottling up all their emotions is not the one that's brooding in the corner and snaps at you for trying to befriend them. More often than not, it's that friendly person in your circle who makes easy conversation with you, laughs with you, and listens and gives advice whenever you're upset. But you never see them upset, in fact they seem to have endless patience for you and everything around them—and so you call them their friend, you trust them. And only after months of telling them all your secrets do you realize…

…they've never actually told you anything about themselves.

[emiko-matsui]

"There's a car crash and they take him to the hospital and the doctor says, I can't operate on this child-"

"I'm so sorry. Do you mean the herspital?"

"And he solves it again. So they go to the herspital and the doctor says, I can't operate on this child cause he's my son. Who's the doctor?"

"I'm sorry?"

"You have to tell him that the dad died in the car crash. That's like a really important part of it."

"Oh yeah. Right. So there's a car cr-"

[gahdamnpunk]

WHAT THE ENTIRE FUCK

[5895651-deactivated20210518]

The company isn’t boasting about using cheap/unpaid/forced penal labor.

It’s a project offering voluntary employment opportunities with fair trade wages to incarcerated women, allowing them to amass decent savings and avoid recidivism (i.e., having to return to prostitution, drug muling, and the other poverty-related crimes as soon as their sentences are up, because they’re right back in poverty where they started).

No, it’s not the all-or-nothing Tumblr justice solution™ of magically abolishing the PIC overnight, but it’s a significant improvement over the literal slave labor most corporations employ, while raking in the entirety of a prisoner’s surplus and setting them up for recidivism.

[cinemaglow]

Y'all….this isn’t slave labor the way the vast majority of prusin labor is. They have a 30 hour work week and pay their employees a LIVING WAGE. Also the company was founded after talking to women in prison about their lives and needs

[tronsgender-deactivated20210113]

[brionbroadway]

one take zac walked, so peace scented axe body spray could run, so cis-her-gal-a-them could leave me in full lou wilson hysterics

[familyabolisher]

completely losing it over this bit of glen dialogue i found earlier

[coolsnake]

I need to watch this video every day or I get sick

[yekokataa]

[pocket-deer-belly]

I’m a cis man sure but i also wanna opt out of the gender binary. None of that shit is my fault or my responsibility and i don’t want any part of it

[pocket-deer-belly]

Believing the gender binary is stupid horseshit doesn’t require me to change my gender actually

[pocket-deer-belly]

Yeaheyah you get it. Not trans but i believe in their beliefs. Sometimes i remember people form gender complexes around what alcoholic beverages or colors they like and i just wonder how they’re not fucking exhausted from keeping up this stupid fucking horseshit. Just do whatever you want forever

[sweetbabyrayray]

@nimagine i know u reblogged this from me but ur so correct 🙏 get peer reviewed

[vividplanet]

Hand study gao hang 5x6 feet Acrylic on raw canvas 2023

[catgirl-kaiju]

this one of those pieces where I look at it and think “oh that’s funny, i’ll reblog,” and then look at the art medium and lose my mind

[wario-land]

I hate Nintendo Switch Online. I hate the lack of optimization. I hate the expensive subscription service. I hate the lack of games. I hate the limited time releases. I hate that it's never gonna have the level of content that the Wii virtual console had. I hate what capitalism has done to gaming.

This collection includes: All the GBA, GB and GBC games currently available on the Switch!!

+ And a few extra bonus!! Mostly from the same series'seses

Download here for free!!: https://www.mediafire.com/file/pzycxh6zu9b8drf/GBA_Online_PC.rar (405 MB Uncompressed)

They're all ready to be played in HD on PC. Just drag and drop the files on the included program

[wario-land]

Target audience right here!! The joy of gaming and sharing it with others is the reason i post and i made this blog. Enjoy the Kirbyses very much, and do remember to support the official release whenever possible

[fandomsandfeminism]

One thing about fandom culture is that it sort of trains you to interact with and analyze media in a very specific way. Not a BAD way, just a SPECIFIC way.

And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you're supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.

Which is fine if you're looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.

But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well... that's how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.

I dont know what my point here is, really, except...like...I find it very funny when people are like "ugh. I hate Gatsby and Catcher because all the characters are shitty" which like....isnt....the point. Lololol you arent supposed to kin Gatsby.

[afronerdism]

I would definitely argue that it’s specifically a bad way….a very bad way.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Depending on the piece of media, it could be the intended way to interpret it and thus very effective. When I watch Sailor Moon, I know at the end of the day that Usagi is a hero. She is right, and her choices are good. She and the Sailor Scouts may make mistakes, and those mistakes can have consequences, but by presuming the goodness of the protagonists, I can accurately describe what actions and values the story is presenting as good. (Fighting evil by moonlight. Winning love by daylight. Never running from a real fight. Etc etc)

If I sit around and hem and haw about whether or not Usagi is actually the villain because she is destined to reinstate a magical absolute monarchy on Earth in the future, then I'm not interpreting it correctly. I can write a cool fanfic about it, but it wont be a successful analysis of the original work.

But like I said, that doesnt work for all pieces of media, and being able to assess how a piece of media should be analyzed is a skill in itself.

[ollieofthebeholder]

I was an English major. One of our required classes was Theory & Criticism, and I ended up hating it specifically because of the teacher and the way she taught it, but the actual T&C part of it was interesting. And one of the things we learned about was all the different ways of reading/interpreting/criticizing media - not just books, ANY form of media.

Specifically, I remember when we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. We had special editions of the book where the first half of it was the novel itself, and the last half was like five or six different critical analyses of the book from different schools of theory. The two I remember specifically were a Marxist interpretation and a feminist interpretation. I remember reading both of those and thinking “wow, these people are really reaching for some of this”, but the more I read into the analysis and the history of those schools of thought, the more I got it. So for my final paper for that class, I wrote an essay that basically had the thesis of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. If you have trained yourself to view every piece of media through a single specific critical lens - well, you’re going to be only viewing it through that lens, and that means you’re going to read or watch it in such a way that you’re looking for the themes you’ve trained yourself to look for.

My teacher didn’t like that, by the way; she’d wanted each of us to pick one of these schools of thought we’d been learning about and make it “our” school of thought. She wanted us to grab the a hammer, or a screwdriver, or a spanner, and carry that with us for the rest of our lives. She somehow didn’t expect me to pack a toolbox.

My point is: Like OP said, sometimes the tool you need is a hammer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Sometimes you can make a hammer work where what you need is a screwdriver, but you’re going to end up stripping the screw; sometimes you can use a screwdriver in place of a hammer, but it’s going to take a lot more effort and brute force and you risk breaking the screwdriver. Sometimes you need a wrench and trying to use a hammer or screwdriver is going to make you declare that the bolt is problematic and should never be used by anyone. Sometimes what you really need is a hand saw, and trying to use any of the others...well, you can, but it’s going to make a mess and you might not be able to salvage the pieces left over.

[butterflyinthewell]

These skills aren’t being taught in school anymore and you can see it in the way high school aged kids act about media and stuff.

They wouldn’t survive something like Lolita because I swear they’re being taught to turn their brains OFF and be spoon fed all their thoughts by someone else.

It’s really creepy.

[fandomsandfeminism]

I promise these skills are taught in school. I'm an English teacher. In a school. Who teaches them.

Now, Lolita is generally reserved for college classes. But a lot of the rationale behind continuing to teach the "classics" in high school (beyond the belief that a shared literary foundation promotes a better understanding of allusions and references) is that a lot of the classics are built on these kinds of complex readings and unreliable narrators and using historical and cultural context helps in their analysis. (I do think that we should be incorporating more diverse and modern lit into these classes, please understand)

Do all schools or individual teachers do this *well*? No, of course not. Do all students always really apply themselves to the development of deep critical thinking skills when their teacher pulls out A Tale of Two Cities? Also no.

But this isnt a "public school is failing / evil " problem. Being able to engage in multiple forms and styles of analysis is a really high level skill, and my post was just about how a very common one doesnt always work well with different kinds of stories.

[uuneya]

OP, why do you describe analyzing Sailor Moon in a different way than (you assume) the author intended as "hemming and hawing?" I would argue there's a lot of value in approaching texts at a different angle.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Because ignoring context, tone, and intent when analyzing media is going to lead to conclusions are aren't consistently supported by the text you are looking at.

"Usagi is a villain because she's a queen and I think absolute monarchy is bad" ignores the way that Usagi, the moon kingdom, and basically all aspects of the lore are actually framed within the story. None of the characters' actions or motivations make consistent sense if we start from the assumptions that "Usagi = monarchist=evil" and it would cause you to over look all the themes and interpretations that DO make consistent sense.

[pom-seedss]

At some point you have to take a work at face value and see what it is trying to say.

Is the breakdown of monarchy actually relevant to the themes and messages presented in Sailor Moon? No, not really.

So focusing on the Moon Kingdom monarchy and the ethics there of is sort of... besides the point. The Moon Kingdom is a fairy tale, not a reflection of reality.

I’m not actually interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom, you know?

Now, is it *cool* to look at works in various ways? Sure! Are some people interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom and want to explore what that would look like? Sure! And honestly if you want to explore the ramifications of idyllic fairy tale monarchies on the real world, then that’s really cool too! 

But if you are looking at a work to understand what it is trying to say with the text itself, then you need to take some of its premises at face value. Usagi and the Sailor Scouts being the Good Guys is one of those premises. 

And really the “Usagi is secretly a princess from the moon” is just a part of the escapist fantasy for most little kids watching more than it has anything to do with actual themes of monarchy.

There is a lot of value in being able to look at a text from various angles. And it’s perfectly okay to use a text and concept as a jumping off point for other explorations.

But the problem comes when people say that Usagi was definitively a villain in Sailor Moon, or that say Steven Universe with themes of family and conflict resolution is excusing genocide by not destroying the Diamonds. It misses the point of the fantasy. It misses the important themes, the lessons and point of the show to look at it like that.

Basically: reinterpretations are cool, but you gotta know how to take a work on its own premises too.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Exactly. Like, magical princess that shows how monarchies (or the idea of princesses in general) is broken or toxic? Utena and Star vs The Forces of Evil are right there.

The idea of a cute talking cat granting girls magical powers to turn them into warriors against evil and getting them killed being evil? Not a good take on Luna, but Kyuubei in Madoka? Exactly this. That's like, the point of Kyuubei- to riff on the trope that Luna, and Kero, and Mokona represent.

Media can raise all sorts of interesting conversations and discussions and ideas. But there's a very real difference between trying to awkwardly force those readings on a work where the tone and framing and context don't support it and acting like the media is actually supporting those messages, and using those ideas to explore it in a different work or to analyze the trope across the genre more broadly.

[irishais]

Moral and pure does not a protagonist make, and fandom is rife with that exclusive interpretation of storytelling. OP makes really good points; this thread is one of the best analyses I've read about lit crit on this site lately.

Stories aren't made in a vacuum-- every trope/theme/character archetype comes from somewhere and (general) you do yourself a disservice by viewing everything as whether it's morally uncorrupted or not.

[golvio]

“Protagonist” only means “the main character who the story follows,” not “the good guy.” The “antagonist” is “the character who opposes the protagonist’s completion of their goal,” not “the bad guy.”

[neuxue]

best kind of betrayal

You thought I cared about you? How pathetically naive. It was always a lie.

I set this in motion long before I loved you; it's too late to stop it now.

I was betrayed by the narrative long before I betrayed you. I have no choice.

Time after time I trusted you as you wronged me but this was once too many.

We all have roles to play. Mine is to be the agony that torments you into power

This is a betrayal of myself as much as or more than it is a betrayal of you

I never betrayed you, but the only hope we have is for you to believe I did

I only had an instant to choose: myself, or you.

I love you and you have asked me to betray you and I cannot refuse you even that

something else / what is wrong with you / show result

Voting ended onFeb 21, 2023

[lockoutkey]

y’all expose yourselves and take this fanfic test i was just forced to by an irl so now i’m making you too

Get some help bbgs

[minecraftphantomsmybeloved]

In my weak defense I’m in a lot of smaller or old fandoms and you take what you get. Also i don’t usually use the exclude option and i love when the crack is treated seriously.