#ineskew

[specialagentartemis]

not sure whether this counts as a podcast women ask, but are there any podcast characters who AREN'T women who you think would have been more compelling if they were? sometimes i hear a story and think wow, these themes would be so much clearer (or more complex & interesting) if the creator hadn't considered men the default

I think this so many times about so many characters haha…

Podcasts tend to be better about it than other mediums Ryland Grace should have been a woman fr and one refreshing thing I love is that there’s no shortage of female protagonists, cool and quirky supporting characters, and villains!

I’ve heard that SI-5 was pitched and tried out for gender-blind and at one point Michelle Agresti tried out for the role of Kepler, and had she been cast she would have been Colonel Miranda Kepler, and that produces an absolutely fascinating image. Kepler as written feels like he could not be anything other than a middle class white man who has never been meaningfully told “no” in his life. Michelle Agresti’s Colonel Kepler would be a more tragic figure in a potentially really interesting way: instead of failing upwards, she would have had to fight and claw her way into the position she has, not just selling pieces of herself away until there was nothing left but actively killing them to fit the mold expected of her. Destroying her own humanity because it was the only way to prove herself. Making herself ruthless because any crack of human feeling allowed to stay would be seen and swiftly punished, and she has a career here in mind. Miranda Kepler hates Minkowski not so much out of demeaning sexism but because Minkowski looks like a failure state to her: THIS is what happens if you let yourself be weak, and emotional, and act like you care. You lose control and someone else gets sent in to kill you and mop up your mess. And Miranda Kepler is gonna be the one who mops up the messes, NOT the one who gets mopped up. There’s an alternate timeline out there where Michelle Agresti played Kepler and this was her whole deal and in that universe I’m probably captivated by her, haha. The Kepler that we get in canon is a very familiar and believable Type Of Guy and fun-hateable antagonist, but a female Colonel Kepler would have gone so much harder on the aspects of “destroying the person you are to fit the mold they expect you to be in order to get ahead in this company.”

Actually you know what, second answer: Ranaí from Travelling Light should have been a woman because I’m pretty sure he was based on me :P can’t believe they gave my concerns and criticisms to a fictional man smh

[aggressivelyarospec]

WAIT I JUST REMEMBERED THERE'S A ROMANTIC SUBPLOT IN THEATER CAMP 😱 It doesn't go anywhere but one of the main characters has a temporary entanglement with a side character... I'm so aro I completely blocked it out

Thank you!

Here's the original submission.

[myhamartiaishubris]

this is two years late but i love how you translated the li shangyin poem, in particular the line, "Sichuan’s rainy night has swollen the autumn lakes"—what a verb, what an image! and the way you kept the bit about cutting candlewicks together when the rexroth translation simplified it to sitting in candlelight, it implies a more companionable atmosphere which is just lovely. thank you for sharing it with us!

(in reference to this post)

Gosh that's so lovely of you! Thank you so much. I remember reading this poem as a kid and (like many of the poems I read as a kid) not really getting it. It's really nice to be re-exposed to them via poetry Tumblr's circulation of English translations--it makes me engage with the original text more deeply and consider the art of translation more carefully.

(By the way, if you're interested in the nuance of translation, or just want a fun urban fantasy dark academia with oops all scathing dissection of colonialism, I highly recommend Babel by R.F. Kuang)

[dgalerab]

ineskew replied to your post: ineskew replied to your post: ...

His Voices are a glitch with his vocal programming but he figures out how to use it on purpose for comedy ��

GOD, everything that makes richie richie is considered a glitch and he just wants to be funny and have friends. meanwhile eddie who was told that glitching androids are very scary and dangerous and then there’s this noodle climbing a tree and making dumb jokes like “eddie eddie hey eds hey hi look at me are you looking hi am i making you laugh???”

[equalseleventhirds]

The idea that the powers are built by the beings that encounter them just as the beings themselves are changed, taking the theory of the entities manifesting from our fears to a more literal extreme... delicious. I love that the Spiral may not have taken the form of hallways until an architect under Its influence dreamed them into existence, something something the entities are only as powerful as we give them weight & form to be, because they depend on our fears & perceptions to give them form,

YEAH YES EXACTLY

look, on some level my view of things is always always set in discworld’s ‘belief makes things real’ thing, bcos it’s GOOD gdi and i love it

but also i’m gonna keep pointing out that manuela literally did anti-science and created an anti-sun, despite having no idea at ALL how to do so, just bcos she believed that fucking hard, AND ALSO we’re told that the flesh as we know it came into being during the industrial revolution bcos there was so much fear from animals, so applying this system to tma makes perfect sense, and is also very poetic and i love poetry

(and why would the distortion have been hallways with carpet and mirrors and an innocuous yellow door before those things existed? either it changed, it was maybe mazes or twisting tunnels underground before, or it manifested when it was created as hallways. what would have caused it to manifest that way? well. people. why not an architect?)

[chetungwan]

ineskew

I live in a young, suburban cookie-cutter house—it helps that we don't have a basement, and to my knowledge the house has never been empty for more than maybe a month at a time. There are a couple of new neighborhoods down the road, though, which have been built for about a year but are still 90% uninhabited, and I definitely get That Vibe from them

What is it like knowing that you’re the only thing that your house knows and that it depends on you just as much as you depend on it. What’s it like knowing that you get to move on and it doesn’t. What’s it like living in a house that doesn’t know how to take care of people all the way yet, one that’s young but surrounded by a world that knows better. What’s it like growing up with something that’s also growing up but doesn’t have the benefit of a childhood. Does your house creak as it settles. Does it know how to creak. Does it know how to settle.

[statementends]

Wine and tea for Melanie, Daisy, Basira, and Georgie? I'm thinking about the fact that they'd all go out for drinks together 🥺

“It doesn’t taste good!” Georgie said in her own defense. 

“I’ve seen you drink alcohol though. I’ve seen you drink whiskey.” Melanie pointed out pouring out a good glass of wine. The woman were in Melanie’s living room finishing a bottle of wine, except for Georgie who had fortified with a pot of tea. 

“Yeah, but wine tastes like off grape juice. I agreed to this because there was promises of cheese and hors d'œuvre.” Georgie popped a canape into her mouth in satisfaction. 

“I like the taste,” Daisy shrugged.

“You’d have to,” Basira said. “It doesn’t do anything else for you.

Daisy snorted fondly. “You’re just a lightweight.” 

“I didn’t drink alcohol until I was well into my twenties,” Basira protested. “I’m not a lightweight, I just… need practice.”

“Better have another then,” Melanie topped off Basira’s glass with a wicked smile. 

[plounce]

Your fic trope sorter is so hard!!! I love them all 😭

I KNOW!! like obviously but me too... some fic sorters are so broad that i can discard “enemies to lovers” as like “oh i rarely like how that’s handled” so all the caveats i included in mine (partly so people don’t get the wrong idea about like, selkie aus and bodyswap stuff etc) make it so that things are harder to discard. i can think of smth ive read or imagined thats done each of those tropes so incredibly well... theyre all so fun and interesting!! im glad you agree :)