u n sel f ed

i knew that our bodies were trying to become one person

[boomer-mythology-destroyer]

[ceevee5]

[contaiinedarmageddon2]

h0ld up

some0ne confirm

[cryoverkiltmilk]

Nyandalf big natuwals

[wickedwonderlandd]

*turns phone sideways*

[marlinspirkhall]

4:38

[dumbnotstupidfuck]

this photo will have pop culture significance for years to come holy shit

[piedude]

Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind

[somehow-furious]

omg

[pierpointco]

DR: Your shame is not useful to me right now.

[modernbaseball]

Happy Grindr outage at the RNC convention to them

[roysreader]

Kieran managing to break Jeremy during An Enemy of the People

x

[candykitchen-deactivated2024070]

hilariously this is the best way to describe how kendall was conceptualized by jesse and the other succession writers bc objectively his character has no "homoerotic subtext". even the dodds accident, which is arguably the gayest thing he's done, is a very smart depiction of a straight man unwittingly doing something that the in-universe media and general public would interpret as gay, thus mischaracterizing his sexuality; similarly to when logan planted the rumors abt kendall being back on drugs while he wasn't. after all this is a show abt a powerful media family controlling the narrative and manipulating public opinion

but outside of the sexual sphere kendall is so much like a gay man. his attitudes, his personality, including the disordered parts of it, the different ways he relates to men and women have very little overlap with those of a straight man. the constant struggle to perform logan's idea of masculinity without ever displaying a proper understanding of it betrays kendall's outsider status irt the homosocial gynephilic order. to borrow from jstrong, kendall violates his own nature. this violation is dual bc he suppresses his own vitality in an attempt to adopt logan's "awful force". the simultaneous dissimulation of one's own (homosexual) desires and the simulation of false (heterosexual) attitudes are a very appropriate dyad to represent a closeted gay character. succession queered kendall by making him straight

[charlestrask]

brick through the window 🪟 maybe

[helltwat]

thats what I thought brick through the window maybe climbing over his fence maybe

[threeeyedharemp3]

you came back wrong and i am racked with guilt because i cannot bear to see you like this and i should have let you rest. i loved you so much that i defied death itself but i do not think either of us are happy

[vetchtibbles]

this is what microwaving leftover pizza feels like

[threeeyedharemp3]

stop it i was trying to be gothic

[threeeyedharemp3]

no i dont think so

[legsdemandias]

I absolutely will die on this hill, access to fiction that makes your skin crawl and open discussion about it is the best way to keep that skin crawling fiction from happening in reality.

It doesn't matter if it is ~positively~ or negatively portrayed. If you censor it, we don't talk about it, then we can't protect against it.

[legsdemandias]

If you are seriously against CSA, then you should absolutely read Lolita. Yeah, the book that set the western world on fire with weird sexual conversations. 

That book perfectly breaks down what a lot of very real sex abuse looks like. It details how predators look for victims (family members), it details what happens to the child who is enduring abuse (she acts out, she screams randomly, she does very poorly in school, etc, etc), and it shows who the most dangerous perpetrators are (intelligent, well liked, charismatic). 

That book will make your skin absolutely crawl! Once you get out of the head of HH long enough to look at the world Dolores was dumped into, you’ll cry your eyes out. But you know what it’ll do? It’ll open your eyes. 

That book has a lot of weird reactions. Some people turn on Lolita, some people turn on HH, some people turn on Nabokov, but it came out when Freud was still respected. That book came out in the middle of “little girls want to fuck older men and it’s their fault it happened and they’re crazy”. 

It turned the world around. Some of the discussions about the book are nasty!!! Even from Kubrick and Nabokov. Their discussion about Lolita makes my SKIN CRAWL!! They talk about it in a very POSITIVE and WEIRD way. But it opens your fucking eyes and that’s the POINT. 

Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it’s nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality. 

[deanhugchester]

Embrace disgusting fiction and then fucking talk about why it's nasty. Now YOU have the power over reality.

Emphasizing this last sentence because it's so well put. We have to engage with things that make us uncomfortable so we can learn to be better.

[fierceawakening]

Yes! I recall reading a quote from Nabokov about why he wrote it. What I remember him saying was “I read in the news about a man who was arrested for molesting girls, and I became curious. Why would a person do that? So I wrote from the perspective of someone who would.”

That’s… that’s not even weird, I don’t think. I wonder why people do horrible things all the time.

I don’t actually think Nabokov had everything about it right. It seems to me that many real molesters are much more aware of what they’re doing and sometimes even perving on the cruelty of what they’re doing. HH seems kind of quaintly Freudian in comparison.

But that’s what Nabokov would have seen around explaining it, so it makes sense.

And Nabokov really does seem aware, on my reading, that HH is doing harm, and that the idyllic love affair he’s dreaming of is in his head. What’s actually going on is just seedy and gross.

It’s hard to read, hard to understand, and messy.

But those things are what make it good, rather than just “hey look I picked a shocking topic have some torture porn.”

(I hate the term torture porn but it’s the best term I can think of rn)

[boldlygoingthefucktobed]

Nabokov gave extensive interviews and talked about Lolita often. He gets such a raw deal. I have compiled a bunch on my main blog here. i just hate nabokov misinformation so here are three for you:

Do you closely follow Lolita’s fate? I feel obliged to keep up with the destiny of Lolita. After all, people stop me on the street and ask me to comment on opinions. So I have to know what is being said about me. Lolita is an indictment of all the things it expresses. It is a pathetic book dealing with the plight of a child, a very ordinary little girl, caught up by a disgusting and cruel man….But of all my books, I like it the best. The last bone always tastes best.

Nabokov…predicted: “Those who keep looking for spicy bits will not find them. They will not be able to read the book through—they will get bored too soon. The only thing that might be attractive is the diary H.H. keeps. And then, who would be attracted by a 12-year-old girl?"

Vera Nabokov…refilled his glass. “Tell them about the child,” she said. “Oh, yes. I am rather bitter about this. I am in favor of childhood—in fact the very first book I ever did was a translation of Alice in Wonderland into Russian. Anyway, a few nights ago, on Goblin night, a little girl—she was 8 or 9 I think—came to the door for candy. And she was dressed up as Lolita, with a tennis racquet and a pony tail, and a sign reading l-o-l-i-t-a. I was shocked.”

By all accounts and backed up by extensive interviews, Nabokov wrote a psychological thriller and expected people to be shocked and compelled by it in the same way you can't look away from a train wreck. His worst crime was total naivete. He literally never expected that anyone would take it as a romance.

[witchbabywigg]

nabokov wrote "don't create the torment nexus" and then children showed up at his door dressed as the torment nexus and people forever will be like "you wrote about the torment nexus, which is the same thing as being in support of the torment nexus".

[apteryxdrake]

The first time I asked a person about the book Lolita, they told me "it is a romance, it is about a young woman and an older man falling in love". Then the second time someone told me about it, they said it was a nauseating accusation of society. And the third person told me it was a terrible story about an adult predating on a kid.

I really wish the first interpretation never existed. I wish the author's naivete over expecting utter shock and disgust from everyone wasn't naivete but how society really is.

I don't believe censorship is the solution, but I do think such books should be restricted to the classroom with a good learning structure so as to give people context, or at least they should be released with additional commentary so a new reader can understand the entire context.

Also, such books need trigger warnings. I was a victim of CSA. When I was a kid I had a veracious need to read every book in existence, and had I accidentally come across that book and started reading it, that horrible book would have completely wrecked me. Perhaps permanently. It certainly did my head in as an adult to find out that people think such a thing was "romance".

[vaspider]

That is censorship. Restricting who can read a book is censorship. That is exactly what it is.

As frustrating as it is that people read things "the wrong way," and they do, and they always will, making sure people "read the book in the correct and approved way and take away the correct and approved meaning" is... not a thing that should ever be hoped for.

Commentary editions are great! Restricting where and how and by whom things can be read? Not so much.

[yuyurana]

The problem is that you can’t stop people from having bad opinions. Even if you make your intentions really obvious in your text. That’s what the torment nexus meme is about. It’s pretty much impossible to make art that is safe from harmful interpretations or bad faith readings.

So starting to censor media because it might be harmful to traumatized children or adults we end up with the Hays Code and we end up with the Comics Code and with sanitized media that makes it impossible to actually talk about or even acknowledge real life harm.

Lolita should probably have trigger warnings, it also isn’t a book for children. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be accessible.

[the-real-seebs]

You can't stop people from having bad opinions. You could literally tell them to love each other and especially to love their enemies, and within a couple hundred years people would be killing each other over what you meant by that.

[somehow-furious]

Adding to this that anyone who doesn't feel they understand "Lolita" should read the book "Reading Lolita in Tehran."

[depsidase]

[modismod]

Americans don’t wear cowboy hats all the time? What’s the point then?

[forthegothicheroine]

-Bram Stoker

[roy-siblings]

feels like running into an ex (the breakup was not mutual)

[spouseoftherisingsun]

Gonna write an episode of Succession for my portfolio how are we feeling about Mommy's trophy husband has died in a jetski accident, Ken is armpit deep in denial pitching his own yet another media website and it essentially just compiles TikToks and YouTube videos from independent journalists, Shiv did get post-natal depression and sues her doctors after the information breaches containment, Tom makes Greg babysit their child, Connor and Willa are reaching a divorce settlement, Roman as a junior producer on The Bachelor expy because of new pseudo sugar mommy (refers to the contestants as "pooltoys" and mimes blowing them up like inflatables until they pop and if he's lucky, scare the children)

Also if it includes them finding out that some musical has been greenlit to go on Broadway that's heavily based on their family and now they have to go around and get everyone to pool their collective weight so they can swing it around in a legal setting more effectively is it Too meta or is it like Fun meta, because I don't have to have a reason for them all to interact in person, but I think it'd be fun

Also Kendall is very crypto/new age now and clinging to his moderate fiscally conservative socially liberal roots with his life, Shiv is back in politics so she can covertly put a governor who will screw Tom and the company over in office (she will fail), Roman is on a dating app and finally had gay sex, maybe (probably) with a neofascist furry couple, Connor is devastated because Willa had an abortion and did not tell him about it until divorced?

Also Mommy is mad and Tom is mad because none of the kids except Connor attended either the trophy husband funeral or either of ShivTom Baby's first 2 birthdays

[argumate]

you bottle Miette??

[dhavaer]

You crush Miette like the grape?

[digitaldiscipline]

brick up mother in basement for ONE THOUSAND YEARS

[tzikeh]

The Cask of Miettellado

[seravph]

Cannot stop thinking about Anne magill paintings. Maybe my new favorite painter. She just captures this ..,,,,,, dreamy feeling...,,, a certain tenderness..... a fleeting moment of contentedness..... like nothing else I’ve seen

[seravph]

I’m going to scream