#tom simon

[atlantes96]

🪅 Tom Simon 💖 & Víctor Gutiérrez 💙

24.4.26

[stepping-wolf]

Tom Simon

[ascoresdoamor]

Tom Simon & Victor Gutierrez 🌶🔥

[thebichelor]

Ruslan Angelo * 1988 🇸🇪 Swedish masseur and former porn actor | Tom Simon 🇩🇪 German adult content creator © ruslan.angelo © tomberbcn

[shouldering-worlds]

hearing tommy talk about how he's not got much time left before he takes a break is making me think soooo hard about a fanfic I wrote back in 2020.

it's like 10 years later sleepy bois (philza, technoblade, tommy, and Wilbur soot). obviously it's aged in a unique way, but it's still very lovely. Back then I thought Tommy was gonna be really into film as opposed to stand up. quite a beautiful alternative universe<3

https://archiveofourown.org/works/28231323

like if you're curious ^

[awesomecutmuscle2]

[fictionadventurer]

The discussion started by @itspileofgoodthings about fandom engagement with stories put me in mind of two essays by Tom Simon that explored what causes certain properties to gain extensive fandoms and spark creative engagements with the work.

He decided it came down to two factors:

Ozamataz: the particular blend of creativity and publicity that inheres in a self-sustaining fandom, which has the power to call forth new work in the canon if the original authors cease to supply it.

Legosity: the creation of new “toys” that can be combined and “snapped together” in new and interesting combinations.

The essays linked are rather long-winded, but very interesting explorations of the topic. It’s not totally relevant to the discussion that @itspileofgoodthings started, but I think it’s interesting to consider what kinds of stories  invite that “sandbox” approach. I’m just linking them here because I think about these essays all the time and want to have them available for my own convenience (because I can never remember the guy’s name and it requires a treasure hunt every time I try to find his essays again).

[septembersung]

But perhaps, if we pause a little for reflection (a perilous habit for those who would be up to date, for fashion is a Red Queen’s race and you can never afford to stop running), we may find some value in an older and contrary school of thought. Long ago, the necrophilic works of the then young Salvador Dalí forced George Orwell to come to terms with the stark opposition between ‘progressive’ aesthetic sensibility and morals; and he decided, rightly as I believe, in favour of the latter. In ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí’, Orwell wrote: "One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up. If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, ‘This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.’ Unless one can say that, at least in imagination, one is shirking the implications of the fact that an artist is also a citizen and a human being." The touchstone of Elfland — the most characteristic characteristic of fantasy — is the eversion of symbolism. The One Ring is not merely a symbol of power; it is power. Excalibur is not merely a symbol of kingship; it confers kingship. In these terms, we can say that the recent novels of Martin and Abercrombie (among lamentably numerous others) not only symbolize but are the walls around a concentration camp in Faërie. This is the camp of ‘edginess’, where the gaolers are grimly determined that no memory of sun or moon, tree or flower, stone or sea, goodness, truth, or beauty, shall remain to the inmates, but only the unending, ever-increasing, bloodshot craving for the pleasures of torture and the pornography of pain, suitably euphemized as ‘moral ambiguity’.

Tom Simon, “A Song of Gore and Slaughter”