101 Things

[polyhymniaagain-deactivated2024]

It boggles my mind that somebody paid 44 billion dollars to become the permanent main character of twitter.  Say what you will but when William Randolph Hearst owned a newspaper you could not get away with calling him a little bitch in it.  You wanted to call William Randolph Hearst a little bitch you had to go to the trouble of making Citizen Kane.

[lizmitches]

ABBOTT ELEMENTARY 2.06 | Candy Zombies

[tastefullyoffensive]

It’s October! You know what that means... 🎃 (via kxvo)

[queerlyglittering]

all my life I’ve somehow only ever seen the gifs of this. I never even knew that the pumpkin man was dancing to the Ghostbusters theme. This whole thing is so much better than I ever could have expected from the gifs omg

[nessa007]

Sister Michael: An Icon DERRY GIRLS (2018 - 2022)

[basketcasemp3]

[birdwarde]

Snowcap Hummingbird

[farewell-to-lorien]

Art by Kaelin Warde.

[urgetocreate]

Amanda Millis, In Transit, 2020, Oil on linen

[ymutate]

Sleepless Nights by Portuguese illustrator, Francisco Fonseca, born in 1995.

[darkcomedies-deactivated2022042]

girl what the fuck is even the theme of a midsummer night’s dream. is there even a lesson to be learned. is it just vibes or what

[darkcomedies-deactivated2022042]

puck at the end of the play: god did you see that shit? insane, right? haha alright take it easy

[shesnake]

too much “this character did something bad” talking about fictional characters like they’re autonomous entities and not enough “why have the writers made this character do the bad thing and how does it contribute to the overall plot and themes?”

[onehundredandonethings]

lol every time i see Discourse about a ‘bad’ character my soul leaves my body bc so much treats characters like they are people, when this is like, the most fundamental thing to remember in literary analysis: 

CHARACTERS ARE NOT PEOPLE

(i made it big so when i inevitably spin off a big wall of text it remains visible)

here’s two simple ways that I think you can try to disrupt this thinking (I don’t actually care about why the writers themselves do anything, I am more interested in the effect it carries in a text, which is a narrow but i think significant distinction)

1. move away from ‘bad’ and ‘good’ as contrasting descriptors because, ultimately, they are so wide and imprecise that they don’t actually...help make an analytical claim. does good mean ethical? does it mean good at moving the plot forward? does it mean that they are kind? clever? all these things have super different resonances.

2. characters do not do ANYTHING that doesn’t happen on the page. they do not THINK anything that does not happen on the page. there are reasonable assumptions you can make based on what happens in the text, of course. but students (this is where my experience is) and hobby analysts tend to overgeneralize from ‘real life’ what ‘likely’ would have happened to a character. they only exist on the page; they are more linear than people. people often do random, senseless crap. we have robust inner lives. (well-written) characters don'. they have a purpose and people, no matter how singularly focused, do not have that same kind of singular focus, bc life is weird.

anyway i read a book recently where every time the main character did something ‘bad’ the book bent over backwards to cause-and-effect it to be like ‘[clearly bad thing] was good, actually!’ and the result was a novel with no stakes! because if you can retrofit the effect of an action at any point, then a character lacks a clear purpose or direction, and neither develops nor carries the plot, which are really the two main things that characters do. 

which brings us back to the good/bad dilemma. because a character does not ‘fail’ because they are ‘bad’--a character fails when they are boring and ineffectual. a villain moves the plot forward as much as does a hero, and when the hero does something cruel, immoral, or otherwise contrary to their character, it creates stakes: what is worth it enough for a character who values their moral code to give it up, even temporarily? does this bad action change our overall opinion of the character? does the text support this shift in perception (do the actions of the remainder of the text suggest that what the character perceived as ‘worth it’ to give up their moral code was, in fact, worth it? we can look at how other characters, and how their own morality has been portrayed, as well as broader narrative clues to suggest how the text pushes us to interpret this)?

this is a very broad and basic schematic! but deepening our thoughts on how characters operate is a really useful lit analysis 101 skill and practicing it lets us get more and more out of a text (which i think is fun)

[nevver]

[nevver]

Who can sleep? Jean-Jacques Sempé, RiP

[thenighttrain]

it’s crazy how i don’t know what any of you do for school/uni/work? who are you guys outside of tumblr? what do you work as?? 

[utterly-in-like-deactivated2023]

I’m shook at prev tags ur a CHEF?!? Was NOT expecting that tbh-

[kryptonitejelly]

i was legit thinking about this today - what do you guys do (if you are comfortable sharing) - are you in school (if so, what are you studying) ? taking a break? figuring things out? working (if so, what?)

i genuinely want to know (it makes me feel like i know you all that much more)

[arsvitaest-deactivated20260111]

Carl Strathmann, Chesnut Trees, ca. 1900

[forestfables]

tamsyn really did something with the dynamic of jod and the lyctors she was like i’m gonna take just some guy and his friends and make him god and them immortal but ten thousand years later they still kinda treat him like hes god but also like a guy they’ve been stuck being friends with for Ten Thousand Years but you can never tell which one it is because they’re all ten thousand years old and have moved far past normal human expression and communication structures and they’re all also kinda psychosexually obsessed with each other and have and Do fuck .. mercy alters her own dna at will to turn her hair pink for funsies . god makes a none pizza with left beef joke . g1deon is actively attempting murder for most of the book . god has a threesome on the dinner table

[onehundredandonethings]

mercy talking about the jail cell full of acid lives rent-free in my head 

[jitterbugbear-deactivated202505]

sunday downpour

[leahmovedagain]

THE MUMMY (1999) dir. Stephen Sommers

[colins-bridgerton]

kate’s thirty, flirty and thriving results

top 30 television friendships

27.) peyton sawyer&brooke davis&haley james scott (one tree hill)