Textpost Meme Masterpost
Shadow & Bone text post memes masterpost
Lion in Winter text post memes
Frankenstein (2025) text post memes #1
Monterey Bay Aquarium

ellievsbear

roma★
occasionally subtle
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
🪼

tannertan36
tumblr dot com
we're not kids anymore.
Claire Keane
ojovivo
Jules of Nature
No title available
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
taylor price
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

Origami Around
hello vonnie
Misplaced Lens Cap

seen from Brazil

seen from T1
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seen from Indonesia
seen from Mexico
seen from Brazil

seen from United Kingdom
seen from Brazil
seen from Malaysia

seen from United States
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seen from United States

seen from Malaysia
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@heroineaddicted
Textpost Meme Masterpost
Shadow & Bone text post memes masterpost
Lion in Winter text post memes
Frankenstein (2025) text post memes #1
I think that Xena, for all of its ridiculousness and cheesiness, did a better job of conveying the allure of evil than just about any other series I've ever seen. Like it understands that violence, no matter how justifiably it starts out, is addictive, and that hatred poisons you until you can't feel real joy anymore, and it's strange to me that I've never seen it laid out so simply elsewhere.
...so THAT'S what sleeper cell activation feels like. Because yes, YES, LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS, because Xena is such an interesting lightning-in-a-bottle-case study! While I would never discount the work done by the writers, Xena as a show is almost perfectly positioned both historically and structurally to consistently explore that theme.
The first puzzle piece is that Xena was a syndicated show at the tail end of syndication's total dominance of a distribution model. For those too young to remember a time when ongoing plots and prestige dramas weren't the norm, syndication is big part of why older television shows almost entirely kept plots contained to one or two episodes rather than having them span seasons. See, when a show is syndicated, it is licensed out to individual television stations/affiliates to be aired as reruns. The individual station chooses when to air them and in what order, and whether to just skip episodes they don't like in favor of the ones most likely to draw eyeballs, etc etc. The more a show is licensed, the more money you make on it, so there is an incentive to make each episode standalone to make them appealing to each station by enabling them to toss on whatever episodes they like without it being a problem for the casual viewer. Also, before streaming, easy access to dvds and episode recording, and the like, a show could not assume that even its fans would have necessarily have seen every episode. "Catching up" was not an easy thing, and reserved for the most dedicated, doing shit like physically mailing bootleg tapes! Therefore, shows needed to have a consistent formula that didn't lock out the person who couldn't watch last week for whatever reason. Characters remained within more of a status quo. Xena is a "monster of the week" style show, like X-Files. I mention X-Files intentionally, because it was one of the first to really break that no-ongoing-plots structure, and that shift affected its contemporaries, like Xena, who also started to follow suit.
That alone doesn't account for Xena being so primed to explore those themes, of course. Even staying within the same fictional universe, Hercules (which Xena is a spin-off of) and Young Hercules don't even come close to Xena's complexity on the subject. But that's because Xena's premise is perfectly positioned to interact with those practical constraints for this outcome in a way those shows aren't. The status quo that syndication demands remain mostly in intact is that 1) Xena was evil and really good at it, 2) she is trying to do good in the world now as penance but can never undo what she has done. Every episode is about Xena trying to save people while dealing with the consequences of her actions as a warlord. The fact that she was evil cannot be changed or diluted nor can the fact that she must continue trying to redeem herself, otherwise the show is over or is unrecognizable to the casual viewer. But this is also an action show, sometimes cartoonishly so, so she must also be fighting consistently! The core spectacle is violence and the core story is why violence is often evil. There is an inherent tension there that the writers either needed to interrogate earnestly or ignore, and they chose the honest, interesting route. They gave Xena a costar who is innocent and principled but loves Xena, and had her always asking why and trying to understand how Xena could be that person, while being put under similar pressures herself. They had Xena continue to use the tools she has, including violence, for good ends, and wrestled with the answers as to why that was ok, why the violence she did then and the violence she did now were different—and sometimes decided they weren't. They showed Xena struggling with falling back into those old habits because they are seductive and easy.
If someone asked "are there so many episodes of Xena where you find out someone tried to get her to change her ways many years ago and failed because that is a really great standalone premise, or because violence as a tool and power and vengeance as motivators are corruptive and hard to stop using once you start," the answer is yes. The show is cyclical because violence is. But also because it is syndicated.
It's fucking rad and interesting.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1.12 Prophecy Girl
Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Howl”
[Text ID: “I am finally a woman willing to feed herself—light, bread, joy. Sometimes, you don’t know that you’re starving until you’ve had a proper meal. That’s when your heart really begins to howl—when it learns what it’s been missing.”]
SHADOW AND BONE 2.04 "Every Monstrous Thing"
The thing is, in order to have a healthy and robust fandom, a piece of media NEEDS to leave some questions unanswered. Some relations unshipped. Some plot holes unfilled. Some backstories unwritten. Some lore unexplained. You need possibilities that will keep people up at night. The beautiful thing about an empty lot in a neighborhood is what people make in it
They’re narrative foils they might as well fuck nasty about it
Babygirl I know fandom history that you wouldn’t even care about
i know fandom history that even I don’t care about
Guillermo Del Toro's Frankenstein is about forgiving the person who brought you into this world without your permission when you do not want to be alive, and about forgiving yourself for being alive and accepting your life free of guilt and that is genuinely the most beautiful, validating thing I have ever seen in a film.
i've just received news that this post has somehow made it to facebook of all places. this was not on my 2025 bingo card.
I often meet an opinion that, even though the trope where the heroine loses her powers generally sucks, Alina is an exception because, apparetly, it "suits" her.
I do not agree with it, but I guess, people sometimes have bizarre preferences. In the end of the day, if you want to use this trope, there is a much more important aspect to consider: whether or not it makes sense within the magic system of the story.
If you create a magic system, especially if you want to pretend it's science based and has actual rules, it's important to establish those rules and stick to them. And whether the magic can be obtained, lost, relinquished or transferred are very important boundaries to set up. Those are fundamental laws of your universe. You can argue about your characters' wants and need to the moon and back, but you can't selectively switch off gravity because it doesn't suit your character to land flat on their face.
"But it's faaaantasy, it has a defective farting mussel named Zoya dragons!" is a weak excuse, because while the rules of the fictional world might be different from the real world, they still have to be logical. It's impossible to take the story seriously if the logic is violated and abandoned every time you need something new to happen.
So, initially, Grisha magic seems to be innate. It can manifest itself at different ages, but you need to be born with it. There is no information about non-magical people being able to gain it either intentionally or after a stressful event, sickness, near-death experience or anything else. It's fair to assume it's genetic. Moreover, it appears to be so integral for all the body systems that a person suppressing it suffers from poor health, lack of appetite, constant tiredness and other symptoms similar to hormonal disbalance or vitamin deficiency.
There is no way one could lose such an essential part of their organism and survive without severe medical consequences. what makes even less sense that Alina's lost magic somehow gets transferred to other non-suspecting people as if it's not a genetic trait but a strain of chickenpox with the incubation period of 20 seconds. How does that work? Was their DNA rewritten? They suddenly grew a new organ?
If that's the case of overexertion from using three amplifiers or some sort of karmic punishment for "greed", then there should be precedents. You can't tell me there were no other Grisha who would try to bite more than they could chew. There should have been, and otkazats'ya bigots ,who never miss the chance to bitch about Grisha snobbery and corruption, would gloat about yet another Grisha who "succumbed to greed" and lost their powers for centuries. However, not only are there no precedents, we have the whole Morozova family and the pile of "saints" to prove that excessive, frivolous and extravagant use of magic does not, in fact, result in losing said magic.
No matter how much you believe that the ending suits Alina because "she's just a gurl who never wanted power uwu", there is no coherent way this would work in the magic system established by the story itself. not only does it not fit into the story, it becomes the last nail in the coffin of an already weak and flimsy magic system.
you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it
girl help there's people on this post who can't actually read my text
the self-indulgent fanfiction will continue until morale improves
The self-indulgent fanficiton will also continue after morale improves, just with better morale.
amen