#toasthaste

[nohoperadio]

whyd you reblog that shirtless boy. you could have spent that energy on giving him a shirt. he's probably cold. just goes to show how fucked up and backwards your priorities are 🙄

If I gave him a shirt then he wouldn't be the shirtless boy anymore would he. I'd basically be ending his life and creating a new, shirted boy person to replace him. You would have me kill the shirtless boy remi?? And you dare to judge me...

[etirabys]

"I mean – squids kind of lactate."

– @toasthaste, to widespread outcry

[ianthe-is-a-bitch-and-i-love-her]

would you recommend a closed and common orbit to someone who found small angry planet a bit-- disappointingly conflict-averse? I appreciated that a Bad Thing was allowed to happen at the end, but up until that point it kept feeling like conflicts would get set up and then anticlimactically defused, over and over (also, it's been many years at this point-- would i need to reread small angry planet in order to read a closed and common orbit?)

I think if you're looking for an action story you're going to come away disappointed. Small Angry Planet and Closes and Common Orbit can both be best understood as slice-of-life sci-fi. Where the former is about the interpersonal relationships of the crew and their development into a family, the latter is much more focused on two different characters' journeys to self-actualization in a world that is hostile to their existences. It's also something of a generational story, and there is some very rich conflict, but it's not space opera action conflict.

As for needing a re-read, I think if you remember the main alien species and the ending you'll do just fine. Thanks for the ask :)

[queenlua]

I have now seen the boy and the heron and I must confess I don't think I really.... get it? I went in with my themes/imagery/metaphor interpretation brain module attempting to fire on every cylinder it's got but after mulling it over with the friends I saw it with, it feels a bit like I'm grasping at straws.

Maybe the pelicans are people individuals trying to survive and feed their families even if it comes at the cost of others, maybe the parakeets are gluttonous jingoists, maybe the granny is de-aged because people we write off as silly old coots do in fact have rich inner lives and complex histories and competencies, maybe there was something about trusting the next generation with the keys to the future... I dunno. I barely understand what happened in the movie! It feels like there was a ton of imagery that went way over my head, and I don't know if I lack the cultural or historical background to pick up on it or what.

I'm curious about your thoughts and interpretations, if you're interested in sharing them!

(Gorgeous movie though, all the environments were so rich, I especially loved the clouds during the beachside sequences, and the boat. And I loved the way the parakeet king moved!)

i think you’re right that the pieces don’t quite cohere.  but man how beautiful and strange a lot of those pieces are

(spoilers and rambling under cut)

the elements i enjoyed:

* the opening.  the opening was so extraordinarily patient!  i was astounded how long it went with only the barest *hints* at the supernatural.  the heron swoops by, the heron calls Mahito’s name at the window, the heron breaks a stick in half—and that is all.  around and between those scenes are long, long stretches of Mahito wandering in the backyard, the old maids haggling for cigarettes and canned meat, Mahito alone in his room, Mahito at school, injured, convalescing.  it’s so tender and tense at once; i wondered if maybe we were *never* going to drop into an otherworld, and honestly was kind of excited about what kind of story that might be.

* but, drop into the otherworld we do, and there—ah, there was this discordance & darkness i really loved, and a lot of rather explicit rumination of *death*, that i loved even while it made me shiver.  it’s the darkest of any Miyazaki i’ve seen, i think—other films have had unbounded appetite as a malignant force (e.g. No-Face’s devouring spree in the bathhouse in Spirited Away), but it’s never been so pervasive or *unchecked* as it is here.  (the only thing that stops the parakeets is dragging them out of that world entirely.)  in a big way i thought the pelican’s death was the movie’s lynchpin.  prior to that point, the otherworld has seemed frightening and unpredictable, but the pelican’s description makes it sound truly *evil*.  or—if not evil, so ill-shaped for life that it makes evil *inevitable*—whether the pelicans devour the warawara, or the pelicans starve to death, either way it is a *malformed* kind of death, the death that comes from oceans devoid of fish.

it’s a far cry from the kind of death we see in, say, Princess Mononoke, where death is a daily reality in this war-swept world, something to be faced straight-backed and unflinching; any dread should only come from the choices made up to that point, not at death, which is only a natural conclusion of the choice once made.  compare to Spirited Away, where death (or other forms of fairy-like entrapment) is—indeed formidable, profoundly scary, but hard work and determination and keen thought lets one dodge over those bad ends.  but in The Boy and the Heron, death happens unnaturally, unavoidably, a symptom of some profound disorder because it is a profoundly disordered—diseased, even—world.  (in Mononoke, the lepers lead hard lives, but find life in honest labor as members of Lady Eboshi’s iron town; the starving pelicans have no one.)

* so at that point i’m on board, we’ve got this grieving kid surrounded by hideous death-vibes on all sides, but…

well that leads very naturally into the elements i *didn’t* enjoy haha:

* it’s natural Miyazaki wants to bring in that great-uncle character and his blocks, offering Mahito the choice we all get in some way: pick the very few things you can move, and move them ever so slightly to right the wrongness.  it’s rather *on the nose*, but i think i get why it’s there, and it could’ve worked, if the whole story were *just* about that diseased world, but…

* this whole thing started with Mahito and his step-mom, right?  grieving kid?  needs to learn how to cope with grief & grow up a bit & maybe be a bit more chill to stepmom & ascend beyond the kind of kid who hits himself to garner sympathy?  the way it’s presented in the movie, that blocks-world choice feels so *utterly disconnected* from any of those things Mahito needs to do.  he says a pithy little bit about how he has to return to people who love him, but—i mean, have we seen him actually change much in relation to those people!  (hanging out with young!Kiriko, maybe, but doesn’t feel like enough.)  and also, this world sort of sucks and he was only reluctantly dragged there in fhe first place; is there a reason we’ve seen that would make him want to stay?  any pull that makes the choice feel fraught?  (compare against, e.g., Spirited Away, where it *would* be understandable of Chihiro felt torn about returning—over the course of the film, the spirit-world becomes the place where she learns her own agency and power; crossing back over the threshold into the real world means returning to the place where she was, at the last checkpoint, still a whiny little kid.)

* so yeah my feeling was that there was a serious lack of connective tissue between the idea of “mahito learns to reckon with death and grief” and “mahito learns how to navigate & triumph in this world.”  i can imagine tweaks to make that work—for one, the bait-and-switch between rescuing-mom and rescuing-stepmom felt a little strange (it was the main moment where i really wondered if i was missing some cultural nuance—i think it’s a moment of growth if mahito learns to be less *cold* to stepmom, but i don’t think he needs to literally *treat* her the same as mom, and… i got the vibe that that’s what the story expected him to do?).  and that connective tissue *could* be built up—foreshadow the appearance of the great-uncle some more, and make the stakes/weight of that choice more clear; probably have a couple conversations between Mahito and the heron that more clearly touch on, e.g., whether Mahito expects to find his mom, what he expects to get out of this, how *he* feels about saving the stepmom instead, and also the heron’s motives (i think we do! need to find out! at some point! what exactly the heron’s getting out of it—if the heron’s e.g. angling the whole time for the destruction of the world, that could add a lot of weight/triangulation to that central choice!) and the fact that at the end the otherworld is destroyed—instead of still out there, somewhere—that itself could be used as a meditation on needful vs needless death/suffering or something, idk.  that tissue isn’t in the movie itself but i think it’s gestured at.

* …or, well, that’s what i was thinking, until i read this post (linked to me by krad, HI KRAD YOU’RE THE BEST), which… makes the case that all that shit with the great-uncle/mom/stepmom/heron is just kinda… forced symbolism about what The Process Of Making A Film Is Like… and, man, that read makes a depressing amount of sense, lol.  so yeah i think that’s probably what miyazaki was Actually Going For and that’s what you want in order to “get it” haha.  but i like my weird sideways angle on it better so i typed all that up too, HOPE IT WAS AT LEAST MILDLY INTRIGUING

[st-just]

"reads a truly unrealistic number of books" mutual for sure. making the rest of us look bad >:0

re:

Oh, thank you!

The secret is to have enough people who read a triple-digit number of books every year in your social circle to entirely ruin your conception of what a normal amount of books is.

[argumate]

you(I think it was you) had a post about a thousand years that was something along the lines of "human: thinks cats are overly optimized for hunting, thus they see laser pointers as a thing to be hunted" "human: overly optimized for creating so thinks everything must have a Creator" I can't find it and it's killing me.

no I don’t think that was me, but I agree with the sentiment.

[earlgraytay]

toasthaste replied to your post “so my grandparents, bless their hearts, are very much Golf People and...”

oooo. how much is it About the mc being a trans man vs that being relatively incidental?

@toasthaste That’s relatively incidental, though all of it is handled well. 

the best thing about The Raven Tower is the worldbuilding, ye gads. it is easily Left Hand Of Darkness tier. Ann Leckie is very good at building a world that makes sense, where all the parts and systems fit together and the magic works in a logical way. you can TELL her first love is SFF, and she delivers.

the dark and spooky and claustrophobic atmosphere! the way she runs riffs on the familiar Hamlet story, using it as a backbone for a much much weirder story about dying gods and debts that must be repaid! the narrator who is a god and doesn’t quite understand humans, but is curious enough about them to try to pick apart their motivations!  

the prose styling! the complicated and morally ambiguous but mostly likeable main cast! 

there’s lots and lots of incidental characters who are queer, and a female autistic incidental character whose autism is treated as an unambiguous good thing and who survives the story. (and I hate that that’s something that makes me squee, but it is.) 

and there’s one other big thing I love about it but that’s kind of #spoilers territory, so 🤐

[lysikan]

What's your opinion on rooting out words like "stupid" "crazy" or "mad" from one's vocabulary on the grounds that terms like those are ableist?

as a person what has difficulty with words, especially with making word mean less, I object to removing words that is more precise just because some peoples doesn’t grasp nuance. The word “stupid” is a good example. It has never been used as a category, it has always meant a person that is not using knowledge they have or an idea spawned from not thinking through a concept. it isn’t ableist, it is descriptive. Removing it from my vocabulary would mean I has to make many words convey a thing that a single word conveys perfectly by itself.

Crazy has always meant silly to the point of not being worthy of consideration. Very useful.

Mad means angry, but sometimes is used as meaning “extremely obviously not rational” (is often used in comics for this meaning).

All words can be misused to be ableist slurs. 

I will bring up the word you didn’t include what has many serious uses - retard. It means slow. Is used in science all the time - such as in retard a chemical reaction.

Context is what matters, not the word.

Don’t try to ban words, call out the misuse of them.

Words mean things. Assholes is gonna be assholes and they will just take nother words to be assholes if you let them take away words what has uses. Will end up speaking in grunts and pointing and they will use that to be assholes.