Jul 26, 2025
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Started reading Moby Dick last night and truly was not prepared for how this book really does just start like "yo, I'm Ishmael, and whenever I feel like I want to kill myself, I go and see if any ships are hiring sailors." Like oh, okay bestie!! That's how we're doing, huh?
Phantom of the Paradise is truly unparalleled as a movie because there is precisely one character who understands the narrative he is in and tries to Get The Fuck Out, and he's a campy diva glam rocker named Beef.
Wanting to design nonhuman or monstrous characters and having an "oh come on, I can do better than that" approach to the actually nonhuman elements is all well and good until you find yourself looking up stuff like insect anatomy and genuinely having "😳 I think I hauve covid" reactions. Watching just clips from normal nature documentaries and your brain is computing how to apply this to monsterfucker porn at the speed of light. Girl Help.
You know, for as much as it FEELS like it should be a done to death cliche I've seen a thousand times, I feel like I haven't seen much done with the malaphor of "being the skeleton in [one's own] closet". Like, that just feels like a phrase I should have seen a billion times in posts about characters being LGBTQ+, or about how repression feels, or whatever. There's a damning secret you have to keep. It's yourself. You've kept your queerness a secret for so long, you've died and rotted away behind closed doors. Etc etc. Maybe it's just too obvious, like, we've all subconsciously agreed that if we saw someone say that shit out loud we'd all go "really?"
My boyfriend saw a post litigating on the Proper Definition of a "poor little meow meow" and asked me if it was true, not knowing that he was unlocking one of my Rant Topics.
I will share my concluding statement, which is:
Bitten by the bug to try GMing tabletop RPGs more (due in equal parts currently to my subscription to the Quinn's Quest Patreon, my chats with some dear IRL friends who are on my sickos wavelength, and receiving the new Heart sourcebook and going "oh yeah, I remember now, this system FUCKS") and mulling over ideas of things I'd like to run or campaign ideas.
Which is very fun, but does keep running into the problem that my preoccupations with horror, and erohorror in particular, or "the fatalistic cage of performative cisheteronormative femininity that one insists is their Choice (one day I'll run this Demon The Descent idea)" or just wanting to tell stories that lean a little intimate and unsettling generally does mean that uh. I might wind up hamstringing myself a little on actually getting players.
It's just very funny to myself. I could run something appealing and accessible. Or I could go "hey pals who wants to go to Murderfuck Mansion and watch their characters squirm"?
Thinking about adaptations again. Thinking about how genuinely frustrating the whole conversation is because of how much of the oxygen in the conversation gets taken up by discussing fidelity to the source.
Like, even when we accept a good adaptation can have marked differences from the source, then the conversation just gets flipped to "well an adaptation doesn't HAVE to adhere perfectly to the source". Like, yes, I'm very much thinking of "Wuthering Heights" and GdT's Frankenstein here, because a lot of mainstream conversation has been had about the ways they're different and the authorial intent of doing things differently to the source and whether or not the authors would be rolling in their graves. Like, thankfully I've gotten some good conversations with people about the conversation between adaptations but. Hmm.
So the more we see looser transformative large-profile adaptations of well-known works by well-known creators, I think the conversation is going to have to draw from the schema used to discuss fanfics. Like, not the specific tropes or terminology or whatnot (though much of that HAS also seeped into the mainstream) but like. Conceptually. "Is this actually a transformative work (fanfic/adaptation) or is this your original work (sparked from, inspired by, the source) where you're desperately trying to convince me these are the characters from the source material?" is coming to mind a lot.