[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

Discussions on white savior complexes and imperialism in Dune frustrate me because no one ever reckons with the full picture. They always leave something crucial out.

Firstly: the Missionaria Protectiva seeded the Panoplia Propheticus on various worlds as a general tool for Bene Gesserit interests. It was there to be exploited by any Bene Gesserit who needed to take advantage of a planet’s culture and gain power there for any reason. It was independent from the Kwizatz Haderach project and was probably exploited many times throughout the history of the galaxy. The Lisan al-Gaib is not the Kwizatz Haderach and could have been any old Bene Gesserit who found herself on Arrakis.

Secondly: the messiah legend is false, but Paul is not a false messiah. Because he happens to also be the Kwizatz Haderach, he is able to deliver on the false promises of the Panoplia Propheticus and he chooses to do so. I know people claim that Dune is ambiguous about whether or not his visions are “real” but I find that really unconvincing. He’s able to use his prophetic memories to navigate perfectly after he is blinded. They are materially real even if they are philosophically dubious.

Thirdly: Frank Herbert may have sought to critique the danger of heroes, but the reason Paul is portrayed as “bad” for the Fremen is because he literally does liberate them. He fully delivers on the messiah thing, ending their oppression and elevating them to power and status throughout the galaxy. Why is this bad? Well, because they are spiritually corrupted by material comfort, of course! Access to abundant water leads to their ~cultural degeneracy~ and they lose the noble savage status of their pre-Muad’Dib ways. They’re too sexy and relaxed and hydrated and this is a tragedy because they no longer expel their disabled into the desert to die and are thus racially diminished by their liberation.

It’s just like. Dune is a Matryoshka doll of eugenics and colonialism in ways that are constant overlooked and which I honestly find really interesting.

[apolladay]

Which notorious English class short story fucked you up the most?

* I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

*The King in Yellow

* The Lottery

* The Masque of the Red Death

* The Monkey’s Paw

* The Most Dangerous Game

* The Nameless City

* The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

* There Will Come Soft Rains

*The Yellow Wallpaper

* The Veldt

* “you think those were fucked up? What about [X]!”

Which notorious English class short story fucked you up the most?

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

The King in Yellow

The Lottery

The Masque of the Red Death

The Monkey’s Paw

The Most Dangerous Game

The Nameless City

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

There Will Come Soft Rains

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Veldt

“you think those were fucked up? What about [X]!”

Voting ended onApr 30

[it-grrl]

Okay I have things I should be seeing to but I couldn't help myself. In case you, like me, have not read all of these stories and would like to be amongst the lucky 10,000 today:

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers*

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson**

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard O'Connell

The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

Honorable Mention from the comments/reblogs:

All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury

*note: this is actually a collection of short stories and clocks in at about 72k words

**Originally published in the New Yorker in 1948; interestingly, the New Yorker still has this story archived on their website BEHIND A PAYWALL. CAN YOU IMAGINE.

[redstonedust]

if vampires existed in real life i think there would be shady companies advertising "organic blood" sourced from "willing donors" who are coincidentally all poor people being paid like $5 per blood donation. and like haughty vegan vampires who only drink a synthetic blood drink thats brewed in a way thats actively worse for the enviroment. and radical traditionalist vampires who go on tiktok and claim that true alpha chads have to drain and kill people and anyone who leaves their victims alive is a liberal cuck. enter the world of hypothetical insufferable vampire politics with me.

[annabelle--cane]

maybe I've been staring into the abyss of dracula paprika discourse for too long but what if the real answer to this mystery lies not in whether the paprika hendl itself was spicy or sweet or salty but in asking if it's a coincidence that this vampire novel with a lot of motifs of disturbed sleep starts off with someone getting so thirsty that he can't quench it no matter how much water he drinks, having terrible dreams all night which he directly attributes to this thirst, and then voluntarily going back to eat more of the dish that made him so thirsty in the first place

[pastelgothica]

[spookyloop]

Original art: Elysian Fields Wallpaper, designed by Dan Funderburgh (Source)

[lacetulle]

Sara Mrad | Botanical Alchemy

[mitakuye-oyasinn]

Set of three Coiled Snakes, Bronze, possibly Spain or Germany, 1570-1629, detail. © The Wallace Collection

[trycijacks]

Sansa Stark, praying in solitude

[marzipanandminutiae]

One thing I find super interesting about specifically the costume design for the Creature in the new Frankenstein is that, when his hair grows out, he wears it parted on the side

Which was considered masculine in the mid-19th century (Center parts were feminine), and which he probably would have observed from at least some of the other people he was around

To me that seems like another point for the theory that he wasn't just passively letting his hair grow out, but actively liked it that way and was making decisions about his appearance for the first time in his life

Excuse me I have an emotion about personal aesthetic having a deeper meaning in my eye 

[sparvverius]

ok the one criticism people have of frankenstein 2025 i disagree with is that it's "disrespectful" to quote byron at the end because he's a man... he was mary shelley's friend! the ghost story competition was his idea! he helped her get that book published! she quotes his poetry HERSELF in other of her works!! it's an homage to their personal friendship and their deep respect and appreciation for each other's talent, to the creative influence they had on each other. give her the respect of seeing her as part of an artistic and intellectual milieu not just a downtrodden woman. for the love of god

[fictionadventurer]

The very best thing about The Phantom of the Opera is that it shows us a possibly supernatural occurrence, then gives us a natural explanation that is infinitely crazier than the supernatural one would have been.

What if there was a ghost in the opera house that was killing people?

Requires you to accept the existence of ghosts, but otherwise is a straightforward story.

What if the chief contractor who built the opera house was a deformed circus freak who used his experience building palaces and torture chambers for sultans to keep building secret passageways and torture chambers in the basement when construction halted during the Franco-Prussian War, and then kept living down there working on an opera and killing and blackmailing people who crossed him and also training a pretty opera singer that he wants to marry?

There is nothing in the world that could have prepared me to expect even half of that.

[fictionadventurer]

I love how every character of The Phantom of the Opera is in a different genre.

Raoul and Christine are in a fairy tale. The prince fell in love with the common girl. They wandered through an innocent world full of fairy stories until reality tore them apart, and then when they reconnect, they're ensnared in the darker side of fairyland, where angels turn out to be dark wizards who try to trap you in their underground caves of wonder. Even when they're adults, they're presented as innocent children who are caught up in a fairy tale adventure.

The Persian is in a political thriller. He knew Erik as the strange foreign mastermind who built mysterious palaces and dark torture chambers for monarchs. He manages to save Erik from unjust execution, but he still keeps tabs on him once they're both in a foreign country, and he ultimately has to stop the maniac from enacting a terrorist plot.

Raoul's brother is in a story of domestic realism. He's living the respectable life of a landed, titled gentleman, but now his brother wants to marry an opera singer. His story is just a tale of stopping his younger brother from disgracing the family's reputation. After everything unfolds, the general public also has this view of the story--it's nothing more than a spat between brothers gone horribly wrong.

The managers are in a sitcom. They're the victims of an elaborate prank! Someone is messing with them (and it's really quite impressive the lengths they will go to for a joke), and they're turned into the butt of the joke as the situation forces them to do all sorts of things that look ridiculous.

The narrator's in a true crime story. He's the investigator who sees that no single one of these genres tells the full story, and it's his job to see how all the pieces fit together to give us the whole picture.

[thestuffedalligator]

Vampire movie where a crew of recently turned vampires make an elaborate heist to break into the blood bank. At the end of the movie they drive away in their getaway car, tap their blood bags together like they’re toasting with champagne glasses, take a swig and immediately throw up because this is one of those stories where vampires exclusively have to drink fresh blood straight from the vein. Nobody thought to check first and assumed this worked by Vampire Diaries rules

[thestuffedalligator]

#could they launder it? #drink from someone’s veins but continuously transfuse them with the stolen blood so they don’t die?

@softlypause I don’t know enough about blood transfusion to dispute this but please know that I am deeply in love with the concept of blood laundering

[i-still-dont-like-your-face]

Originally thought it was a sort of memory game when the old man flipped the letter card for the girl to repeat, just realized that he was also intentionally teaching the creature to read

i am not fine

[aquilaofarkham]

something i don't see folks mention (which is understandable given how MUCH is in this film) is this line from victor... i think considering the time period, it made me assume that the frankenstein family in this adaptation probably owned or at least had financial stakes in american slave plantations and i think that adds a whole other messy layer to victor as a person

he only mentions it in passing because he was still a child at that time and wasn't aware that his family fortune came from human exploitation and evil, but also it ties into his laboratory and making of the creature being entirely funded by an immoral war profiteer. he and heinrich exploit other humans by either callously judging men about to die at the gallows or clinically picking apart what's left on a battlefield, surrounded by bodies who met their end from heinrich's own weapons

the entire frankenstein name is built upon cruelty, privilege, and grandiose ideas of self importance and it's only when the creature—someone who has nothing, thinks of himself as being nothing, and was created from this cruelty—does the cycle stop and what the frankenstein name meant and represented can finally fade away

[bookshelfdreams]

something about victor standing under the gallows, evaluating the men about to be hanged for their usefulness in his experiments. something about his disgust at their poor health, likely caused by the same conditions that led them to this very moment. disappointed that he will not be able to strip them for parts. something about him digging through the piles of corpses on a battlefield, and being annoyed that the brutality with which they were killed limits the usefulness of the bodies. something about his experiments being funded by war money. something about piles of bones in a landfill, body parts flushed down the drain. something about the casual disregard for life and personhood not just in how he treats the creature, but in everything he does to make him, too.

[medusas-daughter]

I love that Viktor Frankenstein is shown treating actually sick people horribly. I love that he goes on this long agrandizing rants about defeating death and then stands in front of people condemned to die, miserable and terrified, and looks them in the eye and goes "ugh terrible condition ugh be glad you're about to be killed you would have died anyway ugh" because yeah that's what an ego boost "I'm gonna defeat death and beat god" will do to you. That's a horrible doctor, an incredibly smart one, but a horrible one. He doesn't care about improving the quality of life of anyone, he doesn't care about actual healing, he cares about his ego, about getting retribution from death for having taken his mother, not anyone else's mother though, or someone else's son or father or daughter or sister, just his mother. Even when he finds out about Harlander, who has done so much for him, there was no empathy only disgust at his compromised body. And I liked that it was shown because so many doctors, even to this day still, despite the development of ethics and deontology committees, don't understand that the job isn't to defeat death or destroy a disease, the job is to help a human being. Even when you can't heal you should still do your best to help them, improve their quality of life even if they only have one minute left to live. That's the job.

But Viktor didn't vow to become a better doctor, he only vowed to become better than his father but he was still on the same wavelength, still on the same ego trip, just better at defeating death. And the other doctors who rejected him, they were also on the same wavelength, still obsessed with their place vis-à-vis god, as good christians and good extensions of their god, that they shouldn't try to defy him. But noone in that boys' club was identifying the actual problem of their practice. That patients were accessories when patients should be at the center of every single decision a doctor makes.