#media consumption

[victusinveritas]

[sunfloweringstories]

Too many times people will say ‘framing this story like x is problematic, it should have been framed as y’ and you look at the story in question and it was never framed as x to begin with, they just interpreted it like that and were so uncomfortable with their own interpretation that they decided to blame the creators for intentions they assigned.

[sapphiresaphics]

If you’re criticizing a show and one of your points of contention is “this (blank) was pointless…”

I’m here to tell you “no it wasn’t.”

I get it. If something doesn’t go the way you expected, or you felt you were promised one thing and got something else, it’s really easy to believe that whatever (blank) was IS actually pointless and useless. The problem is that RARELY happens, especially in produced media.

Maybe that happens occasionally for a single fan fic written by someone who doesn’t have much writing experience, but when you start getting into productions that spend thousands or even millions of dollars to produce… the idea that (blank) was inserted into the narrative “for no purpose” tends to fall apart quickly. Someone is having to justify spending that much money to put (blank) on the screen. There’s a reason.

Obviously, there are exceptions. Sometimes a show is canceled prematurely and the creators aren’t able to fulfill all the setup they intended. Sometimes there’s executive interference. And sometimes writers will change between productions and the new writers will take things in a different direction. That absolutely can happen. But even still… even when the world is against a production and it’s all falling apart… even then what you see up on the screen is put there “for a reason.”

I cannot stress how frustrating it is to see criticisms that dismiss elements of movies and shows by saying “(blank) didn’t make sense, there was no reason for (blank) to exist.” Because doing that is so… un-curious. Aren’t you intrigued? For good or ill, don’t you want to understand why? Even if it’s not what you were expecting, don’t you want to have a better understanding of the how and why things you consume are created? Maybe learning about the behind the scenes might give you greater insight into the way things are made, both physically and narratively.

Aren’t you at least CURIOUS?

[toribookworm22]

I hate being someone who is scared, sensitive to horror, and has to worry about it triggering paranoia that will take over my next several nights.

But who loves horror. Theoretically.

Because what it essentially means is I have three choices with interacting with horror media:

1. Never watch/read/listen/etc. anything even possibly horror ever again.

Not a fun option. I love horror.

2. Turn off the logical part of my brain and say screw it and watch/read/listen/etc. anyway.

Also not a fun option. Because it more than often leads to nightmares or being unable to sleep well for a few days, and/or seeing things in my peripheral.

3. Send out the fucking horror scouts that are my brother and friends and make them report back to me on whatever it is I want to watch/read/etc.

Probably the best option, but it does have its own drawbacks. A. I can't watch it with them for the first time. B. There are only a few people I trust to do this, so I have to be very selective so as not to shove too many things their way. C. Sometimes, they will offer up their scouting services (and even watch it with me sometimes), get me absolutely hooked, only to then have to withdraw due to: failing media quality/literal distance and streaming service distance. Meaning I now can't watch it anymore.

(Yes, this has happened more than once.

1. My brother got me hooked on The Last Of Us despite my debilitating fear of zombies by watching it before me and calling out all the zombie moments as we watched it together. BUT! He was then unhappy with some choices they made in season 2 and refuses to finish watching OR watch it with me. So I can't freaking watch it.

2. One of my friends got me hooked on Yellowjackets, which I can watch so long as it is daylight and I only watch an episode or two. Most of the time. There are a couple of characters and moments that are huge triggers for me, which we found out while watching. This is made better while watching it together (I can even watch at night!). But we live several hours away and we are now in season 3 for which I do not have the platform. Meaning I will have to choose whether or not to rewatch alone by the time it comes out on Netflix.

3. This one is only horror-adjacent, but it was why I chose not to watch it alone. Another friend and I decided to binge season 1 of Severance together. It was amazing; the kind of horror I can handle. But it is on a platform she has.)

Honorable mention: Get a friend or two who will rant about all the horror media they enjoy so that I get to experience it through them.

This is how I have "read" several different Stephen King novels and "watched" most of American Horror Story and Obsession. This one rules for stuff I will NEVER be able to engage with.

In short, being a prone to paranoia and nightmares horror lover SUCKS!

Shout-out to the people who make it suck less.

[lonelyy-clown]

2026 media consumption part 2

april

-The Spectacular Spider-Man (season 2)

i'm finally done with another show i left half finished ages ago

now i get why everyone likes this show. it was great! neat character stuff. i like how not boring all the fights were. i can tell they really tried lots of fun stuff in them. and they did an awesome thing with green goblin. he was really good villain here

although obviously with all tv shows for some reason, they also dont go well for my repulsion. i couldnt care less romance subplots broo. pretty much had about half of the show muted and ignored. man, i also know when i get into tmnt 2013 again, it will just be the same. i hear it has that "pair the squares" nonsense. sighh. (rottmnt save me)

-A Natural History of Dragons (chapters 8-14)

huh. realizing that two books im reading right now have the same setting of being in the 1800-1900s range. and they both use the word luncheon lol

its still surprising me when its said the protagonist is like 19 in this book too. the whole fancy language stuff makes everyone sound like theyre 30

-Primal (season 3 episodes 1-5)

so this was a show i thought i was finished with since the main character literally dies at the end of the season. but like i said. i didnt consider that maybe they could simply come back as a zombie. who woulda thought

hit a bout of procrastination this month though so i didnt feel like watching the rest of the episodes. but so far it was neat. i need to watch more slow stuff. i alway like when something takes time to just be slow and chill.

i could watch something with a mute/dialogueless protagonist

-To Shape a Dragon's Breath (chapters 50-58)

thought i could finish the whole book this month but it also got caught up during the procrastination too

i dont think i have much new to say besides im still enjoying the story

i like how much Anequs refuses to change herself to, well to put it bluntly, give the white people reason to respect her. they look down on her and her culture, but shes not letting that get to her. shes confident in herself, so theres no need to see her struggling to fit in. theyre not gonna let her anyway, so she doesnt need to try

may

-Smiling Friends (season 2 and season 3)

heard the news about the show ending so why not finish it real quick

didnt mean to binge it until 7 am though, but it was just a lot of fun. very easy to watch each episode until i had completed it.

-Project Hail Mary

they said "aroace main character" and i said say less

ohh this was an awesome movie! i initially wrote it off as just an action movie where theyre probably fighting off asteroids fields and stuff, but its actually really fun. the sci-fi stuff was just enough to follow, it was so lighthearted i think theyre coining this movie as "cosmic hope" which is AWESOME, and it may get you to feel a lot of feelings. im definitely still feeling them

-Exit 8

its the movie about the game. it was pretty good. i feel bad about comparing it to mortuary assistant a lot in my head, but it feels like just a better version of what that movie couldve been.

the bits from the game were used pretty well here. they expanded on it in a really interesting way for the movie too. like the people you encounter in the loop are actually other people stuck in them too, but theyre only used in your respective loop to be weird and creepy. and the story was pretty good, my subtitles were broken on the site so i didnt get the actual explained context, but from visual alone, i think it worked well enough

-Primal (season 3 episode 5-finale)

like i said, it was neat. chill pace. cool animation. that is also one way to completely change the last ending of the main character dying into a happy one.

when the fix-it fic is actually in the show itself

tho one thing i wasnt sure about was that mira knew it was spear as a zombie? idk i was waiting for it to be a reveal or something, but it turns out she knew all along i guess

-Elatsoe (chapters 7-22)

i'll say now this book is so good!! i already said before but pairing indigenous culture with stuff like vampires and fae has been so fun to see

like telling a vampire they're not welcome in your home, but that means the entirety of the land they're standing on?? awesome!

it's just very neat having stuff like coyote people show up just like normal to what would be the average supernatural world. i'd probably be bored if it was just a werewolf or something

june

-To Shape a Dragon's Breath (chapters 59-87)

another good book finished holy moly

dont wanna repeat myself again but this was just fun to read. even if seeing Anequs is dealing with discrimination does suck. shes so confident in herself it doesnt affect her so much

Anequs and Sander are my favourite guys. i could read so many short stories of just them hanging out lol

athough i'll say i still cannot visualize what skiltakraft is. have no idea whats going on there at all. im gonna have to see this in a cartoon tbh

-The Truman Show

intended to watch this for a long time but i just kept forgetting

it was neat. glad i finally know whats the deal now even though i couldnt have been anymore spoiled. that goes with a movie older than me though

and man. 90s stuff really just has this specific vibe i havent felt in a while. is that what nostalgia is? brings me back to watching vhs tapes as a kid honestly

-Invincible (season 2 episode 2-5)

dont have many thoughts on this one honestly. i already watched the first few episodes before and just didnt remember until seeing them now.

and yknow, im deciding on taking a break from this for a bit. at least just a week or two into next month. something about watching it now is just kinda wonky. my hype from the first season has dimmed a lot since then. the show isnt like bad. i just dont have the motivation to watch it now, so might as well not make myself concerned about it for a while

also do these aliens say stuff like "oh god"? something i noticed. its funny

-Spider Noir (season 1)

looked forward to this show since it was announced. and i just think its alright

its the most noir detective kind of show it could be. with the bonus of including spiderman.

my only hope for this was to not include any kind of multiverse nonsense. even if i havent watched a ton of marvel stuff in a while. i am so tired of hearing a cameo or hints to the other things. but im glad this was allowed to be its own thing and be a simple story

-Elatsoe (chapters 23-36)

read this in two sessions because the waiting lists are long. as you can tell i havent been able to read natural history of dragons since april :c

also i might be too used to stories that have these crazy twists. because i was still expecting some rug pull as i didnt think we'd be this sure on who murderer is, but i guess thats just me. i think the reveal was supposed to be the supernatural ability the bad guy has. which my anticipation for a different kind of twist mightve taken the wind out of its sails a bit. its still pretty neat tho. i thought that maybe he was part of a vampire family of some kind, which i wouldve thought was kinda underwhelming, but its a cool plan he has. but its an evil plan so nvm it sucks actually.

anyway. holy crap. i was already having fun as i was going through the story. but once i hit the third half of the book i couldnt stop reading. it ramps up so much.

i wanted to see whats going on with trevor's emissary (not exactly his ghost but was formed from the pain of being murdered and desires to exact vengeance). how the gang tries to solve this. and how ellie finally takes down the bad guy. and it was AWESOME!

native fiction keeps winning fr

-Obsession

ill admit this is the type of movie i wouldnt like off the bat. it heavily involves a relationship. and yeah i wasnt into it for the first half. i felt like i wasnt really giving it a chance. but im just a relationship hater it cant be helped

but oh my god the horror really slaps once it shows up. not sure how much watching this at 7 am affected that. but i sure was screaming in my mind for this movie to stop and i mean that as a compliment

-So Let Them Burn (chapters 1-16)

another book on my dragon riding list

this was the fastest i read a 700 page book oml. completed in two weeks. i just thought i really need to make more progress on a book while i got them. but then i just kept going

definitely has a way more serious tone than i expected. all these characters have trauma from fighting in a war when they were thirteen~ 0_0

but this was a pretty good story and with good characters. everyone is so complex. the situation is very tense. and really cool plot

though it ended on a cliffhanger and my libby cards dont have the second book in their catalog. so who knows when i'll read that o7

ps. i like that the money is called "dragoons"

-To Ride a Rising Storm (chapters 1-15)

i know this month is stacked enough as it is but once libby told me this was available i didnt want to miss an opportunity to at least check some of it out

holy HECK i like these books. ill say again anequs is such a great protagonist to follow, it makes reading like 80 percent better and easy to sympathize with as she deals with all the discrimination

[superiorgoobus]

Ok, since ya'll want to be self-rightous on my posts, lets clear some things up-

Here is an incomplete list of ways people are affected by the illiteracy crisis that keeps being mentioned:

Viewer is unable to find a way to relate to the main character due to the character being from a different background than their own, and because of this, thinks that the piece of media is not worth anything to anyone anywhere. Even the people who CAN relate to the main character. (Example: men who thought Turning Red 2022 was a bad movie because it was about tween girls and not Mid Thirties Wite Men Who Do Stonks)

Viewer does not understand why a character would make the decision they made, and also doesn't understand that the character is driven by the genre the author chose because the character is not a real person and this is a work of fiction. Example: People who complain about the victim in a horror going into the basement, being all like, "uh why does she go into the basement, don't you know you're not supposed to go into basements if you hear a creepy noise?" like I don't know man, maybe they thought the water heater was broken and simply thought they were going to go down and fix it, people go into basements for normal reasons all the time.

Viewer does not understand why a mysoginistic author would make badly written female characters. Also, Viewer does not understand that the author writes the book and makes the characters move, the characters cannot think for themselves. You cannot mentally will the character into become a strong independant woman by the power of parasocialism.

Viewer does not know that different countries have different social rules, and assumes that every book/movie/etc about different countries and cultures is inherently a bad book.

Viewer does not understand that different genres can have different rules when it comes to plot progression and how the subtext is used (see: every person who didn't understand why Iron Lung 2026 would have long pauses between jumpscares and gave it a bad review. That's a classic horror trope that was correctly used. As opposed to action movies, that can be just non-stop movement and progression)

Now, here is a list of things that are NOT EVEN REMOTELY related to this illiteracy crisis:

dyslexia.

visual impairment.

not speaking middle english.

[thepunksoul]

This week of media I have consumed:

Legally Blonde 1 - rewatched

The Devil Wears Prada 1 - rewatched

Godzilla x Kong: The Empire - new

Twisters (2024) - new

Zootopia 1 - new

Lilo and Stitch: The Movie - new

Spy x Family S3 - ongoing

[thechaotickalamari]

-i think my personality is just things i’ve absorbed from media at this point-