THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

val || 31 || italy || [prev. harrowscore // lucy-ghoul // maddenedbythesstars]

[maryasmorevna]

Sasha Samokhina + Farit Kozennikov, Vita nostra & Assassin of Reality

[catcatalpa]

[alanofalltrades]

[pissbataille]

In their morbid withdrawal from life, they enact a kind of symbolic double suicide that, like the conflagration at Manderley, signals Rebecca’s triumph. It is “odd and ironic,” Nina Auerbach tells us, that du Maurier’s “brutal depictions of emptiness should be given the label ‘romance.’ ” Sally Beauman adds that “a story that attempts to bury Rebecca, the ‘unwomanly’ woman, in fact resurrects her, while the voice that narrates this story is that of a ghost, a true dead woman.”

Maria Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives

[little-miss-rasputin-pageant]

in the lighthouse robert pattinson plays a man that has beef with a bird. and then in the boy and the heron he plays a bird-man that has beef with a boy. this leads me to belive his next role will be a man that has beef with a boy who is also a bird. and this is how i know robin is going to be in the batman 2.

[greenbloods]

what makes theon so so fun to me as a character is that because he is so deeply unpleasant and unpalatable in his actions, he immediately takes on this "character it's okay to torture" role in the narrative. no action taken against him is morally wrong because he deserves it. and yet the tension in his narrative is that everything done to him is still wrong even if he sucks. he didn't deserve to be taken as a hostage from his mother as a ten year old, he didn't deserve to live with a noose around his neck carrying his would-be-executioner's sword, he didn't deserve to be treated like a freak by his family for being a hostage for nine years. the weird tension of victim-perpetrator in the esgred scene (which nosafeanchorage discusses more cogently than i can here) and obviously the theon adwd reek-ness of it all play heavily into this too. he did so many awful things. and yet the reasons he's punished have almost nothing to do with his actual crimes. there's no justice here. and that's fun.

[dillusion-art]

- Nona loves the beach.

ig: d.ill.usion

[loveridden1999]

cannot relate to lovergirl aesthetics because genuinely liking someone turns me into jigsaw

[liesmyth]

I think if you have really bad depression for a few years then they shouldn't make you pay dentist bills after

[liesmyth]

was reminded of this post. I'm a person who flosses nightly now. never kill yourself

[oilpalette]

Secret of the Tulips, 2024 by Haotian 郝恬 (Chinese, b. 1989); Acrylic on canvas, 80×60 cm

[princessnamora]

Rachel Weisz as Hypatia in Agora (2009)

[trigona-necrophaga]

Girls only want one thing and it’s a velvet upholstered window seat to read on while it rains

[ghostinwinterfell]

love how the average sansa and cersei interaction is literally just cersei cornering this seventh grader whenever she’s bored and being like “tell me something sansa. do you believe in kindness” and sansa going “umm well since you’re asking. yeah. I like it when people are nice” only for cersei to be like “lmao you are so fucking STUPID. what kind of backwards worldview is this 😂🫵 now shut up while I monologue about why you, a 12 year old child, deserve to die” and then sansa nods and goes back to disassociating.

[bob-belcher]

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE (2017)

[tlirsgender]

Crazy unresolved sexual tension is more fun to write than "normal sex" to me. What is sex? Some naked bullshit. I want to see them writhing in their self made purgatories. THAT'S horny

[bway-ghost]

Christine Daae is a grief-stricken girl. The one person that mattered to her most in the world died and left her orphaned. She looks for him everywhere but can’t seem to find him. Until one day the angel he promised to send her seemingly comes. Is it far fetched? Maybe to a normal person sure. But Christine isn’t a normal person, she’s a shell of who she used to be. The grief she feels is all consuming, and finally maybe there is a source of solace for it. A sign from her father, a path that will lead her back to to him and who she used to be. But of course it’s a lie, a trick done by another whose life is also full of grief. Just a different type. I truly believe part of her loves Erik because he gave a piece of her father back to her, but another part of her resents Erik because he took it away again.

[boundwithpurple]

i guess one reason among many i find the developing “fascism” beat in hotd (rhaenyra is now being presented in behind the scenes commentary as someone “cognizant” of using “fascist imagery” even while the actual beliefs she’s expounding are like “i am divinely ordained to rule this feudal kingdom via prophetic mandate and myself have a semi-divine status” which to me simply has many more immediate ideological connections to other things than to fascist ideology or rhaenyra promoting a modern cult of dictatorial personality) enormously grating is because domination existed before the 20th century. there have been many, many, many empires. as someone who thinks about the horrors the roman empire a lot. daemon and rhaenyra’s valyrian revivalist turn in s3 is more analogous to like byzantines being really into the good old days of the western empire. and obviously all of this exists after fascism, it is pretty inescapably inflecting the imaginary, and fascism made its uses of previous empires. but i do think that’s exactly why there is benefit in disarticulating it, rather than just handing huge swathes of human history to fascists in this way. and resent the idea you can apparently never use fantasy to tell stories that wrestle with or examine any other epochs of human time, other societal orders and other belief systems. all is subsumed to us and what made us, we can and should only ever try to talk about ourselves. “rhaenyra targaryen, feudal monarch with a dragon, is literally, ideologically, a fascist, despite having no actual beliefs that fit neatly to fascism, which is a real ideology with identifiable beliefs, not just like, vibes, because she makes a speech to a crowd that’s supposed to be scary” as opposed to something that allows connections across times ideologies etc to be drawn but does not overdetermine the matter - which i think could be generative - is that kind of giving over.