#somewhat.

[stuffedmuffins]

mini hl2vrai comic of a hypothetical conversation between gordon and christopher !!

i kind of see christopher getting a bit jealous of all the attention he’s giving stain ;, like he still hates gordon but there’s a bit of that craving for eyes on him and interaction still.

[onehellofajellyfish]

He is a man of good birth and excellent education, endowed by nature with a phenomenal mathematical faculty. […] But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers. […] He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson. He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city. — Holmes, "The Final Problem"

Ciel Phantomhive + Professor Moriarty, Just two criminal masterminds with their own Sebastian M.

Book of Murder is such a delight with all of the little easter eggs and references to ACD's work- our Arthur really never stopped thinking about that night.

[fishiiwasdrawing]

Nonesensical nonesense

[ichijokaoru]

I always think this is so cute of us hehe

(even if tumblr kills the img quality)

[decreesofroyalty]

' i won ' t believe it without proof ' scroll down his profile .

[szilverer]

pitiful, wretched, like the rest of them.

[sea-changed]

@selfconsciousfangirl replied to a post: I am so Jack Rackham 4.10 speech about Band of Brothers

How can I persuade you to write this essay

@sacrebloodybleu replied to a post: I am so Jack Rackham 4.10 speech about Band of Brothers

I would 100% read this essay

Well, this is not the essay, but these are something like notes for one section of the essay:

i. Of course, Band of Brothers positions itself so weirdly in regards to what is “true” in its story, given the way that they include the interviews with the real-life veterans at the beginning of each episode; it’s almost as if they’re setting up the meat of the episodes as a sort of documentary dramatization rather than a work of fiction. It’s the camera focusing in on the elderly Ryan‘s eye in Saving Private Ryan: if you could see into these men’s memories, this is what you’d see.

ii. That said, the mere fact that Band of Brothers is not accurate to the historical record is not particularly interesting to me; like, of course it’s not! (And I think overall it does a good job of deploying its accuracy where it counts, in the little details that make the world of he show feel real and lived-in.) To create a narrative out of real life, things have to be cut and changed; that’s how stories work. But I think what’s most interesting to me is the very fact of that narrativization, and if whether in the course of that process you lose essential truth about the war experience not in the negative cutting away or changing of documented facts but rather in the positive creation of coherent narrative.

iii. This is also one of the reasons I found reading Webster's memoir so interesting, because while it is a traditional narrative in the barest sense it never tries to make sense of what's happening by giving it greater symbolic meaning or explaining why. It's a series of events that never really coheres into a story.

(And, of course, it has to be considered that Webster never (to my understanding) "signed off" of the text that ended up being published as Parachute Infantry and that it is incomplete, but I think it's telling that the text that we have is fairly polished and shows no interest in this kind of narrativizing.)

iv. This is also closer to how I remember Leckie's and Sledge's memoirs reading (though it's been many years since I read either of them and may not be remembering clearly). I certainly think The Pacific benefits from the direct adaptation of their own accounts without the interlocution of an Ambrose figure. Indeed--though this is a whole different essay--I would argue that in some ways The Pacific is more successful as a war story because of one of its more frustrating qualities as a TV show, i.e., that the narrative is fractured and incoherent in the literal sense, lacking cohesion.

v. Reading/rereading Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five recently, one of the most interesting things about both of these novels is the way they fracture traditional narrative structure in a way that removes any greater justifying causality--nothing happens for a greater reason or results in a greater good, it just happens. These novels are of course much more sophisticated on a narrative level than any of the memoirs (or The Pacific), and they are both fiction with extra-real elements that in some ways place them outside the direct confines of this discussion, but I think they support the idea that resisting coherent narrativization is key to obtaining something nearer to historical "truth" than mythology in war narratives.

vi. Band of Brothers succeeds as a story in part because it fulfills our expectations for what a story should be, and is satisfying because of that. There is greater meaning to the war, the enemy is comfortingly evil but also comfortingly intelligible, personal character and meaningful friendships are created in this unique and special crucible. The stories we want to believe, those are the ones that survive.