Am Yisrael chai ✡️ Miscellaneous fandom and personal blog.
Things I like: chocolate, World of Warcraft, Dragon Age, Tolkien, Cosmere, Tamora Pierce, singing, Baldur's Gate 3, Dimension 20, various other games and books and things. No guarantee this list is up to date.
I'm InnerMuse on Ao3! I haven't written in a while, but you never know.
i think where i feel the most different in perspective from the average person who enjoys doing Fandom stuff is that i don't particularly care for media that Would Be Good If It Were Good and almost nothing i make is ever coming from the desire to "fix" a canon. the deciding factor of whether or not i'm gonna like something in a fandomy way or just a regular way is completely unrelated to any Missed Potential and entirely hinges on how much i feel like i want to or am capable of filling in the gaps in a narrative or a characters' life that just didn't warrant getting any screentime in the source material. like when i think something had a bunch of potential but completely missed the mark in execution that's normally disappointing more than it is any kind of inspiring. the stuff that makes me want to Create the most fervently is stuff i think is good for real.
tangentially related to this is i think sometimes people are unfair or just kind of incorrect about stuff they perceive to be "missed potential" in fiction. like they see elements of characters/a story that could easily handle being elaborated upon because the author has done a good job making something deep and textured, but these elements ultimately are not the point of the story and spending too much time on them would bog down the pacing or otherwise complicate/overstuff the narrative. and instead of realizing that sometimes being left wanting more is a sign of good writing, they'll view it as the author Dropping or Forgetting something. like it's usually not a mistake when side characters are less developed than the core cast and their circumstances do not get the plot's full attention.
a fictional world that clearly has more stories in it other than the one you're seeing now is not necessarily missed potential, that may just be regular potential.
I feel like I'm being stupid but I would like to ask for a clarification; in your tags on the selkie song post about do you love me, are you saying that Golde is dodging the question and/or giving an ambiguous answer?
well she does dodge the question for the first part of the song. and then:
this is not ambiguous: this her Golde saying that she doesn't have the freedom to know what "love" is or feels like beyond what she has with Tevye.
I know a lot of people find this song sweet or romantic and like that's... fine. It's not NOT sweet. But also: It's Tevye expressing The Selkie Anxiety about whether it's possible for his wife to actually love him given the social dynamic between them, and it's basically Golde saying: I don't have any other experience to compare it to.
Like ... it's. in my mind a strong indictment of the arranged heterosexual marriage in societies where that is the only access to material stability women have: it prevents a true and totally voluntary and uncoerced union between two people. Which is a tragedy, I think? Like it's a kind of horror! and I think that's why a lot of stuff like selkies/crane wife/etc exists because this leads to a sort of cultural anxiety about this disconnect: this woman is supposed to be your most intimate human connection, she sleeps in your bed and makes you meals and bears your children and breaks her back doing chores, and can you ever TRULY know that she's doing any of it out of love? Can you truly know that she wouldn't leave, if she had a better alternative? You kind of can't know! like the point is that it's an unanswerable question. And none of this makes Tevye A Bad Guy or their marriage Evil. it's like... baked into how their society works. I think it is understandable for some men to be really wigged out by this even if they're not able to quite out words to it or articulate what about the intimacy between husband and wife feels incomplete. But like, for men in this type of situation: there's a part of your wife you can't access because it is not safe for her for you to be able to access it. no matter what kind of man you are. because the consequences of your reacting poorly are too high stakes and she hasn't got any other options. and I think that lack of access is a stressful thing to navigate for men who can perceive it.
"If that's not love, what is?" <- "if love is a different thing than living with someone, fighting with someone, starving with someone, sharing your bed with someone, cooking all their meals & bearing their children, I wouldn't know, because I have not had the opportunity to find out"
Tevye and Golde's marriage is arguably the best outcome of the arranged marriage scenarios available to poor Jews in the shtetl, and it's still... this. right? which is not irrelevant to the themes of the overall story: all three of Tevye's daughters rejecting this same tradition, one by one, for various reasons.
My reading of it is: “for twenty-five years we’ve been a team against everything life throws at us, even when we argue. Love isn’t an emotion, it’s a committment – if these twenty-five years aren’t a commitment, what is?” Or, put a little differently: “love isn’t something you feel, it’s something you do. We’ve been doing it for a quarter-century.”
The “it’s nice to know” duet to end it does indicate this is supposed to be a positive answer on the whole.
Wow. I also always thought of it @warrioreowynofrohan’s way, and that’s definitely a more comforting way to think of it, but I can’t say I’m not going to be thinking about @creekfiend’s points for a very long time.
there are a NUMBER of folktale Woman-Creatures like selkies who exist to make the inherently coercive nature of heterosexual marriage explicit and to externalize male anxiety about how if your wife had actual autonomy she very well might disappear and you might never fucking hear from her again
which is a FASCINATING category of Woman-Creature imo
I feel like I'm being stupid but I would like to ask for a clarification; in your tags on the selkie song post about do you love me, are you saying that Golde is dodging the question and/or giving an ambiguous answer?
well she does dodge the question for the first part of the song. and then:
this is not ambiguous: this her Golde saying that she doesn't have the freedom to know what "love" is or feels like beyond what she has with Tevye.
I know a lot of people find this song sweet or romantic and like that's... fine. It's not NOT sweet. But also: It's Tevye expressing The Selkie Anxiety about whether it's possible for his wife to actually love him given the social dynamic between them, and it's basically Golde saying: I don't have any other experience to compare it to.
Like ... it's. in my mind a strong indictment of the arranged heterosexual marriage in societies where that is the only access to material stability women have: it prevents a true and totally voluntary and uncoerced union between two people. Which is a tragedy, I think? Like it's a kind of horror! and I think that's why a lot of stuff like selkies/crane wife/etc exists because this leads to a sort of cultural anxiety about this disconnect: this woman is supposed to be your most intimate human connection, she sleeps in your bed and makes you meals and bears your children and breaks her back doing chores, and can you ever TRULY know that she's doing any of it out of love? Can you truly know that she wouldn't leave, if she had a better alternative? You kind of can't know! like the point is that it's an unanswerable question. And none of this makes Tevye A Bad Guy or their marriage Evil. it's like... baked into how their society works. I think it is understandable for some men to be really wigged out by this even if they're not able to quite out words to it or articulate what about the intimacy between husband and wife feels incomplete. But like, for men in this type of situation: there's a part of your wife you can't access because it is not safe for her for you to be able to access it. no matter what kind of man you are. because the consequences of your reacting poorly are too high stakes and she hasn't got any other options. and I think that lack of access is a stressful thing to navigate for men who can perceive it.
"If that's not love, what is?" <- "if love is a different thing than living with someone, fighting with someone, starving with someone, sharing your bed with someone, cooking all their meals & bearing their children, I wouldn't know, because I have not had the opportunity to find out"
Tevye and Golde's marriage is arguably the best outcome of the arranged marriage scenarios available to poor Jews in the shtetl, and it's still... this. right? which is not irrelevant to the themes of the overall story: all three of Tevye's daughters rejecting this same tradition, one by one, for various reasons.
The fact that one of these moves is significantly more difficult for me than the other two at least tells me which nerve is probably the most fucked up
I’ve been seeing a ton of Project Hail Mary x Iron Lung content on my dash. I loved PHM but I’m usually freaked out by horror And Iron Lung looks too intense for me. Is it actually as horrifying as the Wikipedia article and trailer suggest?
I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.
Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.
A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made.
I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens.
Which brings me to my wife.
Before meeting my wife, I did not often go to places with crowds. I didn't really think of it as avoiding them - those places just didn't seem fun to me. But she liked those places, and I really liked her, and being with someone who really likes something can kind of sell you on liking it too, so I'd take her to places and watch her Visibly Enjoy the Fair and go: Alright. The fair is pretty sweet.
Which is a thing that happened. After fourish months of dating, I took her to the fair. And she fell very visibly in love with a large series of quilts, and she stayed near them for a while, which she thought was very embarrassing, and I got to pretend to be understanding as an outsider, because I thought it would be much more impressive than also being the type of person that would fall in love with a quilt.
Do not do this. The gods punishment for my hubris was that the room next to the quilts was full of butter sculptures, which was an entirely new thing to me, and I immediately fell embarrassingly in love with all of them. It was like the biggest, sappiest non-sexual crush you've ever had, but not only did the other person not recipropcate, they could not, because they were made of butter. I actually got yelled at for pressing my face against the glass, which is fair, but also, I hadn't realized I was pressing my face on the glass, I just started leaning forward because after approximately 30 minutes of staring wistfully at a cow made of butter my legs got tired. And I think I should be given some grace for that.
Anyway. My wife was very patient with me taking more time to look at the butter sculptures than the average person might spent at the Louvre, and she also felt much less embarrassed over falling in love with a quilt, and we had a good laugh about it on the ferris wheel.
A few weeks after that was my birthday. And I don't know what I expected, exactly - but I did not expect what she did.
Dear reader, she made me a butter sculpture. Of a duck.
She picked a duck, because our first kiss was at a Japanese friendship garden. It was our second date, and she'd made up her mind not to do any kissing until the third date, but as we sat on the grass, a duck walked past me, and I'd just seen the hold-duck-gentle-like-hamgurber meme,
so I sort of impulsively reached out and snatched it. I honestly didn't think it would work. I don't know who was more flabbergasted, me or the duck. But we looked at each other, and then I looked at her, and then she looked at the duck, and she looked so incredibly envious that I assumed that must have wanted the duck so I just handed it to her.
It turned out she was actually envious of the ability to just grab a duck as it walked by, but she accepted the duck and stroked it a few times before releasing it. (She also made up her mind to kiss me in that moment, which was very nice.)
Anyway.
She made me a butter duck of my own. Obviously, I fell in love with it immediately. I cleared out all of the freezer-portion of my mini fridge, and I put the duck in there, and for the next several months, when I felt sad, or lonely, I would open the door up and spent some quality time. Just me and my duck.
But this is, of course, not the end of the story.
Because.
After several months.
The mini fridge died.
I really didn't use it that often. It was mostly my duck storage container. But one day, I walked by it, and it struck me that it wasn't humming. So I opened the door, and it was just. Far, far too late. The duck was dead. Dead dead. Turned into a foul-smelling slime dead.
I cried. I did. After the rubber chicken thing, I thought I had changed, but I had not changed, and the unexpected death of my butter buddy left me pretty shook. I texted my then-girlfriend now-wife about how sad I was, and she actually came over to help me say goodbye. We didn't even bother scraping the duck out of the mini-fridge, we just said our goodbyes to both and threw them together in the nice dumpster behind the chapel, because it seemed appropriate to put it in God's dumpster. And it did actually help quite a bit. I certainly did not go 36 hours without eating again.
And that was, for some time, the end of the butter duck.
However. Three (or four?) years ago, for my birthday, my wife was looking around thrift stores. And she found something interesting.
The original butter duck had an odd pose. She'd sculpted it laying flat, intending to raise it up later. But the butter was less flexible than she thought, and she was afraid of cracking it so she left it down which left the duck with a very elongated, very in-motion appearance. And she found a brass statue of a duck in the same, running posture.
It wasn't the original. But it was oddly on the nose. It was a yellow brass, it had the same strange posture, the same crude little face feathers.
I think it was $3, but it remains perhaps the most thoughtful gift I have ever received. I got very choked up when I unwrapped Butter Duck, The UnDying.
I say this with love, but as both a viewer and a former union rep it really feels like the super short and packed shooting schedule for dimension 20 over the years has become detrimental to the cast and their ability to tell a coherent, satisfying story.
like yeah the clear exhaustion and delirium they end up with can make for hilarious performances (to the point I've needed to use my inhaler from laughing so much) but on both a human and a storytelling level, I don't want these people so exhausted and overwhelmed they can't even fully explain why they made the character decisions they did (or understand why other players might be reacting with confusion or frustration).
I don't want Brennan to have to end the show with a direct to camera psa spelling out what was supposed to be the entire message of the story because basically none of those plot points or themes were resolved in a too short season and rushed, unhinged finale. I don't want Brennan to say "I feel good that we had one solid beat of pathos and stakes", and also that he realised he fucked up and put them in an "off" vibe at the end of the penultimate episode that they couldn't get away from because the episodes were shot back-to-back.
I don't want them to be given only a handful of days in quick succession playing these characters with no opportunity to breath, rest, reflect or re-calibrate on who those characters are, why they're making the choices they are, how they fit into the story/world, what their personal arc could involve, or how their storylines will end.
I want the players to be having fun with their friends, that's obviously a big part of the draw of d20, but the other side of that is that they're not just friends hanging out — they're filming a show. they're specifically there to create a satisfying story together for an audience to watch.
I know I have no experience of the realities of tv production and shooting schedules, but the "it's 3am in a warehouse" jokes have gone from being funny to making me kind of sad. like does it really have to be this way? from a worker's rights perspective? can we not give both the cast and crew even just a few more days breathing room? I'd happily wait longer to get new seasons if it meant the people making them weren't burning out and becoming delirious and doing a rush job even they seem kind of uninterested in/dissatisfied with by the end in order to make them.
The starlit mere of Cuiviénen @inner-muse - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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