her death was doubtful, and but that great command

[hollowingearth]

sorry to say but it is not a coincidence that the major people criticizing season 3 are also the subset of people who massively dislike lestat. which is fine! but also lets not pretend its for some grand reason over the writing instead of nitpicking because the focus is on a character you're not particularly interested in

[userarmand]

armand & lestat + age regression

[hollowingearth]

the argument people constantly have over who is the deuteragonist in final fantasy 7 is particularly annoying to me because it's only ever discussed as another facet of "which ship is more canon" when that literally does not factor in even a little bit.

aerith is objectively the deuteragonist of FF7 not because of her connection to cloud but because she is the narrative mirror to sephiroth. she is sephiroth's thematic opposite within the plot structure.

White vs Black. Cetra vs Jenova. Natural vs Artificial. Holy vs Meteor. Purification vs Corruption. one dies in the middle of the story, while the other is dead before it even starts. both unique beings, isolated because of it. sephiroth only ever takes center stage in the story after aerith is completely taken out of it. they literally swap places on who is haunting the narrative.

it is thematically important that cloud, and therefore humanity, is eternally stuck in between the two of them.

[fantasy-daily]

THE LAST UNICORN (1982) | dir. dir. Arthur Rankin, Jr., Jules Bass

[hollowingearth]

the thing with re:zero that is so funny is that people try to disguise wanting rem to end up with subaru by asking for a ''poly'' ending because they know there's absolutely no way emilia doesnt end up with him but its truly just a harem ending and the series has an entire arc and villain talking about how bad harems are in concept lol

[bgm05]

i see that you media addicted louts have filled your tomodachi life islands with video game and movie characters instead of great leftist thinkers

[lozyrosie]

the girls and the gays when legends z-a releases

[theodysseyofhomer]

"did odysseus cheat on penelope?" -> this question becomes more meaningless to me the more immersed i am in homer. "cheating" describes liaisons outside of exclusive relationships that are secretive and illicit because they are not socially sanctioned. odysseus, on the other hand, would have no cultural expectation of marital fidelity. in fact, he would be expected to sleep with other women. this opens up a whole new world of problematizing sexual norms in the homeric epics, so if you mean "did odysseus have extramarital sex?" that's what you should say.

"okay then, did odysseus have extramarital sex?" -> oh yeah. for sure.

"so by modern standards, odysseus cheated?" -> i don't feel that that's the most interesting way to approach the odyssey, when there's so much—

"but such a big deal is made of penelope's faithfulness! isn't it important to point out the double standard?" -> yes, i do think it is, but i also think the poem's actual portrayal of odysseus and penelope's marriage, of penelope's solitude, and of odysseus' encounters with goddesses have unusual features to them. they all show complexity within and beyond the double standard. penelope is more than a faithful woman passively waiting for her philandering husband. she schemes. she questions everything. she has things of her own to protect. likewise, in context, odysseus' (grand total of two) affairs with goddesses are less straightforward than a man sleeping his way through a lineup of temptresses. on both sides! in fact, given the way power dynamics shift in the poem, i'm wary of being too definitive about consent—

"oh, so odysseus never had consensual sex outside of marriage" -> that's not quite what i was getting at. i do read odysseus as a rape victim at the point in the odyssey that we meet him, but as i've said, his situation is unusual and not straightforward. to say he never had consensual extramarital sex is not only ahistorical (not to mention ignorant of the sexual violence conquering armies perpetrate during warfare), but also reading against the text significantly.

"if you imply odysseus ever could have slept with calypso willingly you're a rape apologist" -> this is an epic the musical fan.

[atopvisenyashill]

To Me, and this can never be contradicted because we’re never getting another book, the Three Eyed Crow being Bran is the bittersweet ending. ​If it’s Brynden it’s just squarely a dick move. That’s not complex to me, it’s like the Last of Us thing too, sorry idgaf if it saves the world I think it is fucked up to sacrifice a child to save the world. I would walk away from Omelas, and I do think Brynden is a bad guy, not a “well he’s working for the good guys”, I mean an actual evil guy, for being like “yeah Omelas is no problem I’ll torture the baby myself even.” It’s a completely different conversation if Bran is Omelas-ing himself.

To Me. What that shows us is that the Bran Of The Future has been changed in tragic, negative ways by his experiences. Bran who weeps when they butcher the elk for food because it carried them so far, leading himself through Summer’s body to the tower where Jaime & Cersei are fucking. Ignoring the weeping of his own 7 year old self as he claws his own third eye open. That Bran is someone I can see accidentally making Euron. That is a Bran that has murdered Hodor. Comma but. That Bran is alive. Bran says yes to the hivemind but Bran will wrestle back control of his own mind. It isn’t a hivemind that leads Bran north - it’s just the three eyed crow. Just Bran. That is the Bran that weeps on the wind when he sees Theon & Jeyne. That is the Bran who reaches out to Jon in his dreams. That is the Bran who speaks with a voice that sounds the same as their father and echoes his words to Arya when she prays. The Three Eyed crow is an unnerving ending for him but that’s the ending that isn’t the nightmare. He has changed but he is still Bran.

[the-overanalyst]

now i recognize that there are reasons out there why SOME people might dislike my beautiful queen ena shinonome. however. those people are incorrect. and misogynists. and i can and will defeat every last one of them in hand to hand combat.

[low3mi]

[c6jpg]

Time is short... the moon's fall is nigh.

[sylusxkitten]

And they lived happily ever after...

Please the story ends here

[ilions-end]

what makes the debate about whether odysseus cheated on penelope or not so dull to me is that i consider it a completely moot point and a historically meaningless question.

an ancient greek male lived by supremely different social rules than an ancient greek female, due to a massively patriarchal culture and especially the anxiety about rightful heirs. like when a baby is born you can tell for sure who the mother is (the one giving birth), but not (until SUPER recently) who the father is. that reality has historically meant that married women's movements and access to other people have been extremely restricted by their husbands and society (lest they might get impregnated by someone else) and their fidelity considered all-important, while men's sexuality has had very few restrictions at all.

the question of penelope's fidelity is a matter of a lot of anxiety in the odyssey, and ultimately she's celebrated for being one of the very few women in that epic to keep herself pure for her husband. odysseus' (or menelaus', or nestor's, or alcinous') fidelity isn't ever brought up that way because a husband's fidelity wasn't a meaningful concept in that culture. we're even present for the scene where odysseus tells penelope about his stays with calypso and circe, and penelope doesn't react negatively at all -- as if they both wouldn't expect a husband to stay celibate away from his wife... odysseus has returned and competed and fought for her; his devotion has been proven through the standards of their own culture, not ours.

and even if we all agree that patriarchy sucks i don't think it's fair to blame mythological characters for adhering to the mores of the culture that created those characters. if you want to discuss odysseus' sex life (both forced and consensual) by entirely modern criteria i can't stop you, but at least consider that those are entirely modern criteria that would be very alien to these characters and the original audience.

basically whenever i see "did odysseus cheat" discourse it's like i'm watching someone hotly debate whether odysseus should be fined for coming to troy without an internationally recognized passport. like uhh well why when that wasn't a thing yet and also when there are some very significant things that are actually happening in those parts of the story

[countess--olenska]

Lobmeyr champagne bowl, ca. 1900

[hollowingearth]

Yasumi Matsuno's message for the remaster of Final Fantasy Tactics is incredibly poignant and inspiring. More often than not, developers will hide behind personas and studios to pretend away the context in which a game comes about, specially within Square Enix, this always resulted in a weakened thematic core, with games that often borrows the aesthetics of struggle without any real personal insight into it.

I genuinely cannot wait to reexperience Tactics and his next project. Kind of insane to see someone with a backbone in Square right now, but maybe I'm just particularly burned with the flanderization of FF7, the lack of anything on Yoko Taro's end and how shallow 16 felt to me.

[canteatea]

Red