A Contradiction of Terms

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[puck1919]

I have a Writeblr now

I will still reblog writing stuff here, but I’ll post it first over there. I’ll have to figure out how to show up in the tags, but I’ll work on that later.

The Writeblr url is @puckwritesstuff

[the-irreverend]

And stay safe everyone!

[pajamaslam-deactivated20190101]

the switch from ‘a girl worth fighting for’ to coming upon the decimated village in mulan is THE MOST kick-in-the-teeth mood change IN ALL OF CINEMA

[furikomaru-deactivated20190920]

That scene shift did more for our generation’s understanding of the horror of war in ten seconds than Game of Thrones did in eight seasons, and it did it without showing us a single dead body. 

[genresavvygentleman]

OKAY BUT HOLD ON THOUGH.

I’ve spent the past… five? Let’s say five - the past five years analyzing the structure of Disney Musicals as part of the process to write my own/a parody of them, and the thing is that all the modern ones have roughly the same number of songs - except Mulan.

Mulan has about half, because after AGWFF ends with that unresolved final phrase, there are no more songs until the end credits, which isn’t even sung in-universe.

Mulan wasn’t even the REALM of fucking around - when they arrive at that village, when the true horrors of war are brought into the story, not only does it interrupt THAT song, it breaks the entire fucking mold - the movie’s damn genre changes; it is no longer a musical.

And the Huns represent this from the start - Jafar and Hades are notable for not having proper villain songs, but Jafar does get his Prince Ali refrain and Hades and his plan get sung ABOUT by the muses. No scene with the Huns has any singing, they are mentioned once in song (the second line of Man, natch), and they of all Disney Villains are probably the most serious - no jokes, no witty asides, no sassy delivery of dry humor. The Huns are an invading army who plan to straight up kill a fuckton of people, including children, and AGWFF’s sudden end is the moment when our happy go lucky MUSICAL protagonists finally come in contact with them and their work directly - and it breaks them. Because shit like the Huns cannot exist in happy go lucky musical world. They just exist in our world. The real world. And you can’t sing your problems away here.

The end of A Girl Worth Fighting For is a brilliant use of metanarrative sensibilities to convey a message. It is utterly perfect.

[not-all-there98]

Someone else pointed this out before, but another aspect of this is that when they are singing AGWFF, they are thinking of a romance. The “girl” is a future wife, who they think will marvel at their bravery for being soldiers and exist to make them happy. Then the song comes to its abrupt end with the reveal of the village, where Mulan finds a child’s doll. This reveals to the audience that children were not spared by the huns and shifts the tone of the movie for the audience and the characters. And now both we the audience and the characters see the real reason to fight. The real girl worth fighting for is that child, and all the others like her, who will be killed by the huns if they aren’t stopped

[ahotknife]

the thing is that childhood doesn't just end when you turn 18 or when you turn 21. it's going to end dozens of times over. your childhood pet will die. actors you loved in movies you watched as a kid will die. your grandparents will die, and then your parents will die. it's going to end dozens and dozens of times and all you can do is let it. all you can do is stand in the middle of the grocery store and stare at freezers full of microwave pizza because you've suddenly been seized by the memory of what it felt like to have a pizza party on the last day of school before summer break. which is another ending in and of itself

[clearestbluest]

<3

[shining-bewear]

[naamahdarling]

Hey.

This is one of the reasons why you should be kind to older people.

This happens more and more, harder and harder, and dealing with it that often is pretty rough.

Let them tell their stories.

[the-haiku-bot]

This is one of the

reasons why you should be kind

to older people.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[distilled-prose]

oh my...and I have been chasing (these kinds of) ghosts for the past several months

[storm-of-feathers]

yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.

[storm-of-feathers]

I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.

[beautifulterriblequeen]

Don't think it was an accident that we were encouraged to hate on rainbow capitalism. This is where that was always trying to get us: back to unacceptability.

[charles-smith-pillow-princess]

quick tip from someone who has been in fan spaces for 20 years: being enthusiastic about your rarepair and making your own stuff/engaging your fellow rarepair shippers will ALWAYS work better than yelling at people who enjoy a more popular ship about how bland their ship is

[thewizardconnoisseur]

i really want occtis to touch the stone just to see what happens

for science occtis for science!

[jooyeonjooyeoff]

S A M E

I wonder if two people can atune to the same item at the same time

[puck1919]

Usually no, but Brennan does sometimes make exceptions for good storytelling.

[pastrypufferfish]

[varpusvaras]

I think one of the best and unintentionally funniest worldbuilding aspects in Star Wars is the reasoning of why did Bail and Breha adopt Leia instead of having their own children. Leia is first established as the princess of Alderaan before she is written to be Luke's sister. So now we need to figure out how she got to Alderaan. She was adopted because she needed to be hidden and separated from her brother. Bail was placed there to be one of the only people who knew so there would be a reason why it was them who got her. They specifically wanted a daughter. Why? Because Alderaan is a matriarchal society, so they needed a princess. Why didn't the Queen and her husband have biological children? Because they can't. Why? Because the Queen can't have kids. Why? Because she got injured as a teenager and got her internal organs replaced and her body can't handle a pregnancy. How did she get injured so badly? She fell off of a mountain. How did that happen? She was climbing it. Why was the future Queen climbing a mountain in the first place? Because she needed to go through three challenges in order to inherit the throne and one of them required her to go through something physically impressive. Why? Because before that they just held a Battle Royale for all the heirs and the one left alive got the throne and they at some point figured out that maybe they shouldn't be doing that, actually. Oh, okay.

[eightbitpale]

I am once again reminded of this image

[bashergnax]

I feel like Murray Magnessun could fix Suvi Worldsbeyondnumber.

Here we have ONE brainwashed child prodigy who is finally waking up to the fact that her love of magic has been hijacked by an expansionist empire and ONE tired professor who doesn't give child prodigies and kids from prestigious families special treatment, but who nonetheless believes desperately in protecting the students in her care instead of using them as pawns.

I mean...I feel like they're gonna yell at each other a whole bunch probably. But eventually! Healing friendship! Worthy mentor! You see my vision.

[pencil-line-deactivated20241029]

method actor this method actor that. toshiro mifune played a guy getting shot at by arrows by getting shot at by arrows

and yeah i believe it. ^ this is the face of a guy getting shot at by arrows

[lysenkoite]

[weaselle]

[abz-j-harding]

i can't cope

[mornington-the-crescent]

June 1st

[breelandwalker]

Listen, marketing-as-exploitation discussions aside, Rainbow Capitalism is, has been, and continues to be the canary in the coal mine of social acceptance for the queer community.

If you’ll all pardon my Americentrism for a moment, the amount, visibility, and flamboyance of Pride merch available in clothing, home goods, and comestibles stores is a DIRECT reflection of how safe it is to be queer in public in the United States.

How? Simple. Out groups aren’t profitable. If you’re not “acceptable” in the current social climate, big franchise businesses will not market to you. (Prime example - Look how quickly Target dropped all their Pride merch after having been wall-to-wall rainbows every June for almost a decade prior.)

Sure, capitalism sucks and being viewed as an exploitable marketing demographic isn’t a fun concept.

HOWEVER.

The grim truth is that being normalized enough to be considered profitable by corporations IS A GOOD THING in terms of the barometer of social acceptance.

Same thing goes for smaller businesses that throw kitschy Pride events or even just put a token rainbow flag in the window or somewhere inside the shop. That’s a level of acceptance that DID NOT EXIST thirty years ago, and I can tell you because I was there.

The fact that we can scoff and bitch about being an exploitable marketing demographic nowadays means we have made GIGANTIC strides since the 1990s. It also speaks to the fact that the drive and the conversation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights and acceptance are continuing. And getting louder.

You can be cynical about it if you want. But I will take a store that puts out lip-service rainbow merch over a world that pretends we don’t exist any day of the week. Because that will always mean something.

Sincerely, An Elder Queer

[captaindibbzy]

In the UK so many pride events are going bust because corporate sponsorship has stopped after Trump took office in America. And with the rise of things like Reform it’s getting much harder to be ort and open in public. JKRowling is actively paying people to be anti-Trans and lobbying government and corporation’s alike.

I don’t expect to see anything in my local supermarket this summer. My council will not be flying the pride flag this year. Neither will my library, which a few years ago had six different pride flags outside its building including trans, ace, and intersex.

Thankfully for my own safety I’m not clockable. Not everyone is so lucky.

I’d rather have the stupid Pride Vodka Bottles.

[apatheticfluorescence]

some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it

[headspace-hotel]

Shakespeare is like this

[insufferablepirate]

Every time I see a Van Gogh that’s not one of his better known pieces it absolutely blows me away

Have you seen this shit my liege? smh unreal

[daysleftofsecondterm]

Appreciate art on 963 days left

[kerosene-in-a-blender]

Something fun I noticed this episode is that while Occtis has reached a point where while he openly acknowledges that Primus is dangerous and actively malignant, he's still thinking about this as purely a Primus problem, rather than noting Primus to be a symptom of a broader systemic issue with the Sundered Houses. When the whole table is discussing the possibility of the Sundered Houses colluding to do something during the opening of KoTher'ai, he's the one who offers the theory that it might just be Primus going off book and behind the backs of the other Houses. And he does have reason to think this! His sisters in their letter to his uncle pretty plainly complain that Primus is doing things without consulting other people and neglecting political concerns to focus on working whatever great work of magic he's cooking up this week. But it stands in stark contrast to the perspective that some of the other PCs such as Murray bring to the table which is that the Sundered Houses as a whole are a problem and that even if it's only House Tachonis that's plotting something, the others are still complicit.

Occtis not seeing the Sundered Houses themselves as an issue is something that's been borne out by what we've seen from him in the whole campaign so far. He is, even of the noble PCs, the one who is the most comfortable with throwing his family name around in order to try and get what he wants, as seen during the fight on Hacvallen Brücke. His request that Julien let go of Thimble's wings back when the three met outside Hal's house was framed as an order. When talking to the other PCs he, in spite of his family outcasting and murdering him, still refers to Seremai as one of his vassal houses. There's an assuredness he has about his place in the general social order that makes it clear he's never really thought to question it, this power and station is simply his birthright and he's going to use it. There's also the broader concept of the fact that people are less likely to question the legitimacy of systems they benefit from, and Occtis has benefited a great deal from the social order of the Sundered Houses being what it is, as the power and wealth they hoard is something he as a member of the in-group has access to. And he clearly sees the fact that he does have access to it as simply the natural order of things, it's always been this way and much like the people-cages he's never thought to question it because it's always been that way. Compare that to characters like Murray and Azune who've known poverty and long felt the boot of the Sundered Houses on the collective necks of the common people, and thus are far more aware of where the entire system is unjust.

And the result is Occtis having a much different angle of approach towards the problem of what his family has been up to than a lot of the other characters. Rather than seeing what House Tachonis is up to as the workings of a corrupt and harmful institution trying to uphold and gain more power by any means necessary, he's purely seeing it as an issue of: "My dad sucks." And while that isn't an inaccurate assessment of Primus as a person and a parent, it does lose a lot of the nuance of how he's able to be as much of a problem as he is, which is that he's being enabled by an institution that strengthens itself on exploiting others, and Primus has just taken that to the logical extreme.

[twinstxrs]

azune having the craziest 36 hours ever like investigate the site of a massacre, watch a partial resurrection, get lightly flirted with by the heavily grief-stricken guy you do not like after lightly blackmailing him, go to work, watch like 70% of your coworkers get fired, accidentally make your new fascist boss interested in you, tell your friend said fascist boss might know your history as a child soldier and so you might die, before you can even process also find out the man who you followed into battle that was kind of your father figure may have intentionally not tried to escape at his public execution, realize it’s a non-zero he did that to spare your life, try to hold it together, get called out by all your clearly worried allies for looking 2 seconds away from a mental breakdown, see something you should not be able to see but can due to your magical powers, manipulate a religious fascist into liking you, have a sobbing emotional breakdown about your father figure’s death in the home you once stayed in because he sent you there, start building the beginnings of a mercenary spy network, go back to work, find out you have to investigate that same massacre but this time it’s because your new fascist boss is asking you to, realize you have built your entire life around the fires set by your father figure and he’s now dead, start getting the kindling to set some fires of your own.

[iphigenesis]

in a way john watson is a fantasy (what if you had this brilliant enigmatic friend and what if he liked you in particular and what if he offered you the excitement of youth and adventures and a way out of boring society life and all without having to actually give up your status as a gentleman so you could have the best of both worlds) and in a way sherlock holmes is a fantasy (what if someone never got tired of you despite your various strange habits and mood swings and instead of simply tolerating you they genuinely liked you and what if you didn’t have to live alone forever and what if you never had to give up doing the things you love) and of course there’s the most fantastical part of it all (what if you could afford london housing prices)

[thevulturesquadron]

text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]