hello im nick

he/him, 22, previously known as thenightflier

[serrantz]

nah, nah fuck my body. my mind, however? is a temple. with no upkeep. also open to tourists

[eagna-eilis]

One thing i am fascinated by with TV!TVL so far is that it uses form to construct meaning in a way that I don't really associate with television.

In 'Detroit' the editing is frenetic and psychadellic, and the storytelling is sort of flippant. Lestat is putting on a mask, he's high as a kite, and he's deflecting.

In 'Toledo', the flashbacks are short because Lestat doesn't want to dwell on the past. A sort of calm and relief descends upon the viewer when Louis is onscreen not just because we all love Louis and feel comfortable with him and his voice but because Lestat loves him and takes solace in him.

The form tells us something in this very explicit way. The language in S1-S2 is highly literary, so gorgeous and prose-like and mesmirising. The FORM here is so literary.

[junglejim4322]

Haven’t seen the vampire lestat yet and I don’t need to because I know it’ll just be this

[serrantz]

omg they leaked episode 3

[serrantz]

just woke up from a dream in which amc got fed up with weekly releases and randomly dropped all the tvl episodes along with the second one. my subconsciousness is laying it on thick

[hesitantlyhappy]

iwtv seasons one and two was like being tucked into bed and read a heartbreaking story by Louis du pointe du lac. The Vampire Lestat is like your blackout drunk uncle trying to tell you an anecdote at a family gathering

[nal-sh]

- Xx_DarkShadow_xX -

[serrantz]

i really hope that the main narrative climax of tvl season finale is larry finally picking up the damn tambourine

[vamberii]

don't be afraid

[patricia-taxxon]

the thing is, if your younger self was a bigot or an abuser, u can't make people forgive you. but you still gotta forgive yourself, like that's non-negotiable, dude. that happens before u can even ask the question of earning forgiveness from anyone lese

[patricia-taxxon]

oops, in your attempt to martyr yourself out of respect for your victims you accidentally sabotaged your own ability to conceptualize yourself as anything but a perpetual evildoer who is always one bad day away from hurting everyone you love, all but guaranteeing history to repeat itself. rookie mistake

[patricia-taxxon]

im gonna try explaining myself, cus im a gambling addict and im waiting for the day that it actually works.

"forgiveness" is personal, that's why I said in the post that you might inflict harm on people for which they can never forgive you, but that's their quest. if you abuse someone, you can't go no-contact with yourself. you actually keep living in your own head indefinitely, and ultimately you need to learn to live with yourself in order to continue living a full life without further harm. this is not necessarily an anti-carceral thought, although i am generally anti-carceral myself. I simply want people to like, fix their heart and atone for real with measured accountability & self love instead of dissociating, self-marking themselves forever and guaranteeing their recidivism.

You and a remorseful abuser would both think I'm giving the easy, coddling path. It's actually the tough pragmatic path in disguise.

[ship-of-fools]

[thememedaddy]

[isuggesteatingtherich]

i have a suggestion

[sugar-pink-poison]

I feel like the biggest problem with eating the rich is deciding who gets to eat which billionaire

Liked should we go off first come first served or do we give each individual billionaire to whichever community they harmed the most?

What are the rules here

[isuggesteatingtherich]

[danideer-skull]

Stew pot!

[serrantz]

stew! stew! stew! stew! *bangs table with a spoon*

[mortuary9]

someone's pissed off

[clytemnestraaa]

like the problem with the mm hockey romance genre (and this one isn’t on reid or tierney this is the problem as a whole) is that it takes the bad apples approach to all of it because obviously things like racism and homophobia are problems but to admit they are deep-rooted systemic problems instead of individual makes it kind of impossible to resolve. so it’s easy to write about there being a couple of guys who suck. but when you have to deal with the fact that this is what men’s sports are like, yes ALL of them, yes ALL the men involved to some level, because this is what western notions of masculinity are based in, it makes it not a romantic fantasy but instead some sort of medium dot com thinkpiece. ultimately the issue to me is that sports romance novels are written for an audience that likes sports, which then precludes any real criticism of sports. and as i have said before the ideal mm sports romance novel is written by someone who hates men’s professional sports and not in a “flawed institution but noble intentions” kind of way.

[whatimages]

my personal take on this is that it's not even about the sports of it all, it's kind of baked in to romance as a whole. romance as a genre is really interested in recuperating institutions. specifically marriage! Romance Novels, as a genre, are about the fantasy of marriage as being able to meet women's sexual, emotional, and material needs. instead of, you know, being historically kind of a miserable saw trap where women have to trade their bodily autonomy and emotional lives for material wellbeing. and you can take this all the way back to Austen, but I'd argue that this is still pretty foundational to the modern romance genre. this is why billionaire is so popular, what if you had access to unlimited wealth AND incredible dick AND the guy was nice to you. the dream.

obviously we now live in an age where women don't have to be married to a man to have access to money, but the HEA expectation of romance novels is very much formed by this tie between romantic partnership and material wellbeing. no one ends a romance novel homeless, you know? the fantasy is that this institution can work. don't worry about patriarchy as a set of material and psychic conditions. this marriage is good and good marriage is possible.

so sports, in sports romance, are just another institution to recuperate. the structures are fine, don't worry about the structures! romance novels are, i think, fundamentally about a fantasy of navigating difficult social conditions in a personally satisfying way. and so that shows up in whatever the setting is, but I think it's a fundamental characteristic of the genre.

[yiiiiiiiikes25]

whatsy is extremely and wholly correct. i'm gonna add another thing to the pile, which is that repetition is necessary for recuperation. in order to convert the constitutive harm of structures/institutions into social narratives that can obscure their own second-order effects, you need to tell the story over and over again. sports is violence as entertainment; romance is marriage as entertainment. much of their overlapping* utility is that they are easy to consume, comfortingly predictable, and infinitely available. one romance novel can't flip marriage from the aforementioned patriarchal saw trap into the key to individual freedom *and* safety *and* happiness. a couple hundred thousand released into the cultural id...

with this repetition, the narrative fantasy (like gender, like genre) becomes a stable place you visit: sports is somewhere you can go where merit wins; romance is somewhere you can go where love saves somebody. what's striking about the rise of m/m sports romance in particular is that it raises the stakes of that fantasy even further--there is now somewhere you can go where THREE saw traps (marriage, violence, homophobia) become the conditions of happiness. i don't think it's a coincidence that as material conditions worsen, the escape fantasy becomes...more and more fantastic.

one more thing--much of sports romance's fantasy occurs via a specific elision of racism, particularly antiblackness. (sports in general does this much more transparently!) not a coincidence that hockey's the overwhelmingly white big 4 sport and also the locus of western** sports romance, particularly m/m sports romance. not a coincidence that the gays became repeatably consumable as desiring, deserving romantic subjects within the romance genre writ large before black people have. look at these goodreads shelf counts, and keep in mind that college-educated black women read more than everybody else, demographically:

romance as a genre is run by white women. consciously or not, the marriage fantasy these white women write over and over again protects whiteness more than it protects straightness. along this axis, the fantasy actually functions identically to the institution instead of transforming it. as the repetition of stories shows us, there's a hierarchy of which social conditions are onscreen, navigable such that 'marriage is good and a good marriage is possible', and which social conditions don't serve most creators' stakes in the marriage fantasy at all.

*for doing-my-real-job-today purposes i'm skipping some other very relevant overlaps between sports & romance--libidinal imaginaries, economies of ability and desirability, the temporal bound of a championship or a wedding, etc--but somebody else run w the ball pls

**i would really like to read some comparative scholarship on race overall in western romance and BL, if anybody has recs.

[kutputli]

all excellent analyses and I would extend the specific nature of m/m in both fanfic and romance as a form of homonationalism. Which is to say it rescues not just marriage but also the concept of nation as culture through gayness (I deliberately avoid the word queerness because of how many other identities remain marginalised).

Homonationalism rewards the fantasy of selectively assimilative gays and suggests that the (global North, first world, neocolonial, white supremacist) nation state is worth celebrating because it protects deserving gay men.

Which, to in fact bring it back to sports M/M and Heated Rivalry, is made explicit when it comes to romance characters whose bodies are literally labled for Nation States.

[francisforever2014]

i’m so glad that iwtv is brave enough to show real queer joy in these times— nobody dies of aids, no queerbaiting, just happy, escapist media about gay people in incestuous relationships with their transmasc mothers, gay people beating up and murdering each other, and the queer joy of finally allowing yourself to be a drug addled rock star haunted by your past

[veryintricaterituals]

Incredible headline, all I've ever wanted

[serrantz]

shocking absolutely no one of course

[serrantz]

just hung out with friends ☺️🥰🥰 finished hanging out with friends 🥳 talked to some friends (☺️) for a while📢📢 feeling good🥳🥳🥳 going to bed 🛌 feeling good and happy😇 and not depressed at all 🥰 because i talked to friends☺️☺️ maybe 🤔😨 coincidence?🧍‍♂️

[fus-mar-hoz]

Often, when I interviewed survivors of the violence in 1965, they assumed I would want to ask them about the torture. What it was like to be beaten, to be starved, to be called a witch or a devil, to lose all contact with your family. To be gang-raped and thrown into the corner of a cell afterward, as if you were nothing. This was not usually what I wanted to talk about. To the extent that journalists or academics have ever spent much time asking survivors to tell their stories, they have already asked them this. Too often exclusively this, with the underlying assumption that it was only the excesses of the repression that were the problem, that if they had just arrested two million people, then proved in a court of law that those people were really communists, and executed half of them, that would have been OK. Personally, I was happy to let the survivors just sketch the worst parts of their stories in quick terms, if it became clear that going through those moments again would retraumatize them.

Unfortunately, though, I did have to ask a question, in two parts, that often proved extremely difficult for them to answer. It took me a long time to perfect the wording of this query in Bahasa Indonesia, so as to make myself very, very clear. At least when talking to those who really had been leftists, I would always say, “Think back to 1963, 1964. In those years, what world did you believe that you were building? What did you believe the world would be like in the twenty-first century?” Then I’d ask, “Is that the world you live in now?”

Often, their eyes would light up when answering the first part. They knew the answer. They were building a strong, independent nation, and they were in the process of standing up as equals with the imperial countries. Socialism wasn’t coming right away, but it was coming, and they would create a world without exploitation or systemic injustice. The answer to the second question was so obvious that it felt cruel even to ask. It might have been one thing if their government had committed horrible atrocities, but recognized the mistake, and built a just, powerful society. This did not happen. They are living out their last years in a messy, poor, crony capitalist country, and they are told almost every single day it was a crime for them to want something different.

The Jakarta Method, Vincent Bevins

[vtsumi]

maaa there's a werid fucking cat outside and its pondering the puddles this time!!