#seakiros

[helsinore]

i wish i had anything to say about my favorite book but anything i could say at this point, after two-ish years post reading the thing, would more or less be one really long, unbroken scream/sob/cry. did you know i only read the book because i read the wikipedia summary and i knew that he died and i couldn’t get over that so i had to read the book. i knew he died the whole time and i still thought — for a moment — for one moment!

also, i made a monument to him on a snowy hill in minecraft. on some server somewhere.

[helsinore]

potentially re-inventing gender theory principles entirely in the context of fiction is super embarrassing because you'll be like "in blorbo's matriarchal society, the default body is 'female,' so having breasts seen as gender neutral/the perception of what makes someone 'androgynous' isn't a flat chest" and then you won't connect any dots as to how this may or may not be relevant to the real world that you live in, and if you do connect those dots then you get to feel really embarrassed because instead of coming to a conclusion about gender/sex/patriarchy/whatever through the power of reading important political works, you were just doing it by maladaptive daydreaming while listening to sabrina carpenter.

[helsinore]

whatever you think about the hal arrow wound, it’s worse. you could write an entire episode of house md or the pitt or the good doctor or whatever the fuck else about that goddamn arrow wound. we still use the bradmore screw apparently which makes sense and it makes me sick and twisted. grisping you (much like how the screw was forged to grisp the arrowhead from the inside)

[helsinore]

the Black & White Thinkerrrr wishes that one could worldbuild an ontologically good culture where everyone is so nice and nothing problematic ever happens but that’s just not how any culture works (even if we strive towards like. trying to fix the messes we exist in) so unless you want to build Nice Utopia Where Nothing Bad Ever Happens explicitly and this is your setting for some reason*, you need to worldbuild in, like, flaws within the system of your fictional fantasy culture. and by flaws I mean systemic biases and complex value systems that can be exploited by the ill intentioned (or the good intentioned who still end up going to super hell) and reckon with the fact that your characters of this culture will not always make the most optimal decisions ever + your characters will disagree with each other and have varied opinions on their own fictional culture’s values.

*i don’t trust unironic “This Is My 100% Perfect Good Utopia” posting because I feel like it’s a gateway into “…so this is why they have to fix those Bad And Evil Cultures Who Have Flaws :)” y’know what I’m saying.

[helsinore]

haunted by tlhod i think that estraven being man and woman both (or like. in the sense of like. he and 99% of the people on gethen being neither man nor woman but having the capacity at any time to just be man or woman) is good for the overall theme of like … the blurring of all that we see as concrete i guess. estraven doesn’t do what he does out of nationalism for a specific country he does it beyond that binary. the way estraven and genly’s relationship is like … not platonic not romantic explicitly but some secret third thing i guess to me — estraven hearing the mind speech in arek’s voice and arek having been both his sibling and lover; the blurring of boundary to the point of transgressing taboo. and not all blurring of boundaries is presented as necessarily Good or whatever but genly has to come to terms with the fact that the world does not exist in the rigid binary that he perceives it in (or even that other people perceive it in. again, the nationalism not being estraven’s end goal here but like, the fate of humanity.) light is the left hand of darkness fr its all together.

[helsinore]

everyone needs the oc who goes “god i love being transgender” so every time you feel down about the world / discourse / whatever else you can think about Transgender Bleebus, who transes genderedly everywhere they go and loves doing so all the time, and who would never give that up for all the money and goats and clout in the world.