#should be fun

[tomboxed]

been playing yakuza as of late

[korkyofesher]

I was thinking of posting this to r/beatles and spending the rest of the day watching heads explode

[quality-on-a-patch-of-awesome]

Dunk/Baelor Misunderstandings part 5

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

This goes on for weeks. Months if I want to make it really painful.

Dunk and Baelor only able to be in the same room out of necessity.

Baelor thinks progress is being made when Dunk can look at him again, but that's only for genuine business of the realm. He can give Dunk orders the same way he always has (and none of those orders would ever be "Talk to me. Please, just talk to me. Tell me what's wrong. Let me fix this. Please. Please." no matter how much he's desperate for that), but the second official business is over, Dunk is right back to ignoring him and disappearing and leaving him alone.

Dunk back to calling Baelor "Your Grace" immediately (he stumbles over it almost every time though).

It takes Baelor at least a month before he reverts to calling Dunk "Ser Duncan".

Dunk going to look at Baelor, but only when he's sure that Baelor isn't looking at him and turning his head the second that it looks like Baelor is turning back towards him, hoping that it's quick enough that Baelor doesn't see the sadness in his eyes.

Baelor catches Dunk looking at him occasionally. But he's pretty sure that Dunk is glaring at him rather than looking sad. Maybe it breaks his heart a little every time.

Dunk trying to figure out who Baelor was with, but drawing an absolute blank (obviously because there's nothing to find) because there's no one spending any extra time with Baelor or even any talk about it. Fuck, he's probably still the person who spends most time with/around Baelor (because as sad as this all makes him, he still wants to see Baelor safe and alive and he would never be able to forgive himself if anything happened because of his absence so he keeps up his regular duty of being the one to guard Baelor).

Baelor still trying to figure out what he did wrong and how he could possibly fix it.

Neither of them being able to sleep all that well-

Baelor is alone in that huge bed that he had specially commissioned years ago, when he fell in love with a giant of a man. Now, it feels like a vast empty wasteland without the only other person he wants there. None of the heavy breathing or soft murmurings or constant heat (he thinks that Dunk alone would give off enough heat to keep him warm through even the harshest of winters) that he has grown accustomed tom Doesn't exactly boast well for a restful night's sleep.

For Dunk, the lack of rest isn't about being squashed into a bed that would still be too small for someone half his size in tbe quarters reserved for the Kingsguard. He's slept in far more uncomfortable conditions than this before. No, this is about not having Baelor in his arms, safe and secure and knowing that if anything were to happen, he'd be in prime position to help.

The entire castle is on tenterhooks, waiting to find out what's going to happen next, while gossip spreads about how they got to this point in the first place.

Maekar does not get paid enough for this and is in desperate need of a holiday. He's also this close 🤏 to recalling Egg to court. Primarily because he misses him, of course, but also because if there is a problem like this, his son is undoubtedly the best one to immediately get to the heart of it and make things better.

[classjezter]

Wait, sparklingS? Plural?

Tee hee :D yeah

So at first I made this poll

And a couple of people asked me, what about both? And so I asked again on twitter with that option

So there’s two! :)

[killin-it-girl-wooo]

Chris Kratt Oil Painting WIP

The gnarly charcoal effect you see here is the result of me trying to rub out some annoying charcoal lines with a wet brush so I can actually see what I’m doing :)

My next assignment for this painting class is a freestyle one, I can paint whatever the heck I want! My boy deserves to be on a canvas, ain’t no way I’m letting this opportunity slide

[gazemaizeisdead]

the twits is the worst roald dahl adaptation ever made

the 2025 twits netflix movie has all the typical atrocious hallmarks of children's animated streamslop exacerbated by particularly unique terrible choices in basically every aspect you can judge a movie for. it's rancid in all the ways it shouldn't be and not-rancid in the ways that it should (and yeah, given what it's about, a lot of it should be rancid!)

the animation is ass! the design of the twits sucks! there isn't a single funny joke! it adds a bizarre subplot where the twits run for town mayor in what is probably the most obnoxious trump allegory i have ever seen, it has unnecessary annoying orphans with unnecessary annoying orphan backstories, on and on.

all those things are true and obvious, and i could go on, but i'm just describing a 4/10 boring kids movie. but what takes it above for me is how profoundly it misunderstands dahlianism.

artistically, even if done with non-cynical intentions (and i do genuinely actually think that the people who made this movie think they did think they were making something at least good, which is very sad) the twits is in itself a really strange choice for adaptation. the original twits book itself is probably the most mid dahl book, in my opinion. it's probably the default dahl experience, so to speak.

before we go on, let's take a moment to analyze what made dahl such a hit. he famously gave a list of rules about how to make good children's stories. here they are.

these are great (general, not universally applicable) rules, but one of them is much, much, much more important than the others.

can you guess which one?

...

...

...

it's number 4! revenge is sweet.

i've spoken a decent bit to @lurinatftbn (author of the flower that bloomed nowhere!) about the metarules governing how to succeed on royalroad and similar spaces commercially and the biggest key to success is following what she calls the Frustration/Release formula. however, it doesn't just apply to internet slop, and once you understand it you'll see that it's baked into so so so much of the most successful art and non-art, too.

it's the simplest shit in the world and it WORKS. at the start of the story, the main character should be FRUSTRATED. somebody should WRONG them. they should be subjected to unjust (or at least asymmetrical) cruelty, over and over and over. they should be enslaved, mocked, bullied, tortured, demeaned, offended; the people doing it should be stupid, cruel, ugly, dumb, annoying, ideally in a position of significant social/economic power over the protag. think everybody who makes fun of the protag in solo leveling and similar trash shonen anime, think frieza, think elliot and gretchen swartz from breaking bad, or the bullies from worm, or the bullies from carrie, or the bullies from 13 reasons why, or the bullies from pretty much any piece of media that has bullies in it.

and then...

it gets RELEASED! somehow, whether by the introduction of magic powers or providence or a miracle or hard work or superior intelligence or trickery and protag gets revenge. revenge stories trump every single other kind of story, it hacks into our lizard brains so, so well. this is the narrative of trump (at least, as he and his supporters see it), of crusaders, of revolutions, of political parties, of entire nations, republics and dictatorships and and monarchies alike. frustration/release narratives are so strong they literally create empires. (the history of virtually any nation-state is often framed to its citizens as one of frustration/release (either in past, present, or future tense): "those guys were fucking with us, but we won are sure showed them, or we're winning now, finally, after having to deal with those bastards for so long... or we're going to win, and they'll finally get what's coming to them, once we amass enough strength and become great...")

(i don't know how vonnegut missed this one...)

dahl LOVES frustration/release, and he's awesome at it, and one of the only writers who know how to do it well for very very young children. almost all of his books, especially his best-sellers, do this: james and giant peach opens with the protag's abusive aunts being flattened to death; poor danny and his father fuck over the rich asshole threatening their livelihood; matilda GETS the trunchbull; fantastic mr. fox fucks over the farmers; starving hungry charlie bucket survives over the other naughty children in the ritualistic chocolate slaughterhouse and wins the day.

(charlie and the chocolate factory is noted as being something of an aberration in the dahl canon, because it focuses on the suffering of other children instead of mean adults, but this is because:

frustration/release can still function as long as their are frustrators who are suffering following the protagonist's suffering, even if they are not directly responsible for all/most/some of said suffering. is augustus gloop or veruca salt personally responsible for charlie being poor and hungry and sad? no, but they're dicks and they look down on him and they aren't those things, so if they suffer that's good enough to fill the role.

dahl is writing to an audience of children that he knows one day will become parents, and CATCF is a letter to them; all the oompa loompa songs castigate the parents far more than the kids. in all his books, dahl frequently and explicitly implores kids to try and hold onto the feeling of what being a child is like, even as they get older, so that if they ever do have kids of their own they won't be shit parents themselves.

and it's not a surprise that this is the story he's remembered most for!)

the twits are yet another frustration-release tale, and in the twits book, the twits fucking DIE at the end! the twits torture animals and the animals prank the twits so hard they fucking die.

the kids in the movie prank the twits so hard they start dying too! and then as soon as they do they suddenly lose the ability to speak to their new adoptive magic animal parents who they can only talk to because they are empathetic enough to magically understand them (i'm not going to describe the plot any more, who cares) and then they have to go and save the twits from dying from the dreaded shrinks, who have spent the last 20 minutes of the film trying to literally eat them, and then after they do the twits try and eat them.

and the message of the twits 2025 is this: no, children, you are wrong to hate pure evil, even in your dreams, even in the safety of obviously fake and absurdist fiction, even in the fake world, even there you are wrong to dream of a world where you have agency and power and the ability to fuck over the people trying to devour you and win. don't even pretend to be a little bit naughty once in a while, or you are just as cruel as the people TRYING TO EAT YOU. it's like a hillary clinton speechwriter adapted this. fuck off

[sun-e-chips]

Which should I color?

1(top left)

2(top right)

3(bottom left)

4(bottom right)

Voting ended onMar 16