Ppl where talking about a deadtired zombie au in the deadtired server (shocking) and it got my brain worms going. Imagine tim is the one takibg the pic (pls)
there's something compelling to me about the fact that sometimes leaving a blade or bullet inside the wound it made is the only way to prevent you from bleeding to death. something about the symbolism of it. when the thing designed and intended to kill you is the only thing keeping you alive.
i keep seeing that post about how frustrating the buff guy -> petite girl type genderbending is, and i wanted to add my two cents regarding the addition of ‘just swap pronouns and don’t change the design’ approach because i think these are two sides of the same coin, as they both fail to really delve into what i think is the most interesting aspect of this design exercise.
the reason i find genderbending to be such a fun and interesting challenge is because, if you actually want to be good at it and put thought into it, you have to really consider the character’s canon gender expression and think about what it means to them and how it reflects in their outward appearance and presentation.
is this male character buff because he likes to work out / be strong, or does he aspire to achieve conventional heteronormative male beauty?
is this female character a tomboy because she likes to express herself in a more masculine way, or is she doing it to fight gender norms?
the answers to those questions should produce very different designs!
this website loves to say that gender is a spectrum, but sometimes i genuinely wonder if people actually understand what that means.
gender expression, much like gender, is also a spectrum, which is why keeping the character exactly the same won’t always work, in the same way that just making the character conventionally attractive won’t always work. but sometimes, a buff dude would actually just be a hot girl. lady bane, however, would 100% look exactly the same.
do you think neil, delirious from blood loss, sleep deprivation, and brainwashing, ever saw the three on jeans jersey while in the nest and called out for andrew
I've now spent 8 hours and 16 minutes studying anatomy and physiology and only the body planes and regions which wasnt even my only things to study, I get why everyone was warning me about physio
one thing I like about your interpretation of benson is that it doesn't try to reimagine him as coming across as southern. he doesn't in the movie and I notice a lot of the fanbase doesn't get that. presumably because they've never lived in the south or the place he actually seems like he's from. but I have! I've lived in the south most of my life and also partially lived northeast with my relatievs, and that's A Common White Trash Occurrence, and benson comes across like one of those slingshot up the east coast families. unfortunately my entire family is from jersey so I know multiple bensons, but I was brought up in south carolina. he doesn't have a southern accent at all, he has what sounds like a southern philly or maybe jersey accent. it's not very strong but just in his cadence, delivery, and mannerisms it's definitely that. plus it's VERY MUCH there in the way he says "ma" and anything with that long "a" sound like "randy" and "pants". even his particular flavor of white trash is jersey/philly/maryland, not southern. I feel like benson was raised in lousiana and he's probably the longest trip from his extended family for being that deep south but a lot of his upbringing was probably spent living with cousins in the summers. that's my heavily projected interpretation of it at least. anyway I feel like you made a really good call isolating any identity benson could have because I notice a lot of other posts/writing in the fanbase is trying to figure out how he fits into a southern identity, and straight up he doesn't. that's not a southern boy, his Deal isn't southern at all. he's a hick to be sure but in a jersey trailer way, not in a southern country boy way.
I've been pondering all day about how to answer this because I have a lot of thoughts on Benson and culture and class and how that often seems to play out in characterizations of him. But I've never been able to figure out exactly how to put that into words without coming across like kind of a cunt. But I'm going to try, wish me luck…
In short: yeah, I think it's really important to Benson's character that he's isolated, that he doesn't have strong personal or cultural connections, because you don't get to the place he's in if you're really connecting with other people. I think that's a huge part of the point.
In my personal opinion, I don't think Benson's particular flavor of white trash is regionally specific at all. I've lived all over the continental U.S, and I think there are Bensons everywhere. To me I think the defining factors of his cultural identity, such as it is, are much more about class, and age/generation, than they are about geography.
And here's the part I've never known exactly how to say without sounding like the character police: it's the class bit that does often make it offputting to me to see him imagined as more noticably southern. Like, I would gently pose the question to the room at large: why is it so much more tempting to make Benson seem more southern than it is for Randy?
Re: the accent, there's an overall trend in the movie that the older characters (including Benson's mom!) speak with heavier southern accents, and the youngest characters speak without one. The characters in between vary. And that seems to match with reality to me--regional accents are becoming less common as generations increasingly make the conscious choice to speak more neutrally (often for reasons related to economic class!!). So maybe Benson made a choice to speak with less of a southern accent because fuck southern pride bullshit, or because he didn't WANT to be seen as a hick. Or maybe he was just raised more by the TV than he was by his mom, or like you said, maybe it's an influence of relatives from somewhere else. I do think the accent he has is interesting--obviously from the Doylist lens it's a version of Kyle's own PA accent (#westchestersteeze), though I do think it's has it's own unique flavor from a lot of his other roles.
There's a stand-up special by the comedian Dan Soder where he talks about how everywhere has it's own white trash accent, you just don't always realize it until you hear it. I kind of feel like, however the audience is supposed to interpret Benson's accent, it kind of has that vibe. Even if you're not familiar enough to place where it's from, I think there's some sense of like…it's not the queen's (president's?) english, yknow?
(Also as someone with an adjacent accent, I am perhaps a bit biased in favor of it haha. I do love to hear those short vowels on "Randy" and "honest to god")
But yeah anyway I do think it's important to Benson's overall sense of isolation that he doesn't have a strong cultural identity. Because poverty, while absolutely an identifying factor for a lot of people, isn't really a cultural identity itself without something else--family, geography, occupation--attached to it.
I made a post a while ago about Benson and cultural/aesthetic references to Kurt Cobain where I talked a little bit about how I think there's a big difference in interpreting his ownership and use of guns, particularly the shotgun, through a more stereotypical southern redneck lens versus more hmm….Gen X white trash, growing up under a cultural influence of alienation, depression, and violence?
I feel like this got really fucking longwinded but yeah 👍 thank you, haha
we are losing the ancient art of full song-length amvs so bad. i keep seeing banger edits that just cut off at 30 seconds what are u doing FINISH THE SONG!!!!
loveeee characters who think they're likable but not lovable. characters who know they have surface-level admirable or alluring traits and so make sure to highlight those traits so that nobody looks closer to see what's underneath. characters who know they're hot or clever or cool and use that as a suit of armor so that no one ever gets close to them, because when they strip bare and show their vulnerability they're not any of those things, which means they have nothing left to make up for who they inherently are
Everytime I see posts like this I get filled with such profound sadness
Cause you know who has the same brainrot as you? The same unhinged feelings as you after you've read the fic? The person who always wants to scream about the fic with you?
THE PERSON WHO WROTE IT
I never used to leave comments but since I got into the habit of commenting on everything i enjoy it's been incredible. Especially when the author gets back to me about it and we get to have a discussion of what other ideas they had. One writer replied to my comment with a 5 paragraph essay detailing the Floorplan of the building the characters lived in and it was incredible
Anyways this is all to say that if you find a fic that just makes you want to scream from the rooftops, leave a comment saying that to the author and maybe they will join you and you can scream incoherently together
It's also important to know, this feeling of isolation is what the author feels but ten fold. It's the exact reason writers are begging for comments. It's to talk about the story with someone. That story that's taken up your life for a few hours, or perhaps days, has taken up the author's life for weeks, months, and - very often - years. There's a very good chance these authors are dying to talk to you.
The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve.
Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.
If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.
Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.
This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!
My hottest fanfiction take is I think people should stop posting multi-fandom oneshots as a single fic with like 50+ chapters and instead post them as individual fics
also: if you have 50 one shots in the SAME fandom, post em as separate fics and do the part one of a series thing. We want to read all of them but if we want a specific one we don't wanna wade through because that character was tagged in the 50 chapter behemoth that they're only in one chapter of
i love fics that feel so... grown. fics about adults that were written by adults who have years of life experience under their belts who pour that into their writing. fics where you can tell this is a person who has lived through a marriage or a divorce or a child or children or parent death or any number of Huge Life Events because the way they write with an emphasis on the highs and lows of the human experience rather than an emphasis on tropes (not throwing shade) is just so. oh man, it's just so fucking good. if my blorbos are grown men, grown women, grown people, i love it when they feel like grown people, not just extensions of the (young) author's imagination. (still not throwing shade). you know?
who said please so much to make you hate it? @i-did - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
