unnecessarily descriptive

Me: It is Perfectly Normal to struggle while doing visual tasks in the dark, and fumbling while plugging in my phone is a neutral act. It has been over a decade, can you please just-

The Thing Inside My Brain:

griddlehark modern college au because this book is metaphorically placing me in the jerma meat grinder hypothetical and i need something nice

very funny that of all the power-imbalanced locked tomb relationships it seems like the only character who stopped and thought, maybe due to the present dynamics i should tread carefully and prevent myself from taking advantage of this person (even if unintentionally), was dulcie. bummer for palamedes who i think was very down to be treaded on.

wait. how could i forget you marta dyas..... anyway *judith and palamedes who i think were very down to be treaded on

“Ninth was my name,” said the new arrival. “Ninth was my hearth, and my homeland. Here have I come at your calling. None may return from the River unless he be bidden by blood-rite; tell me, why have I been drawn here?”

birth of a saint

someone talk about the Nona grief with me. Someone talk to me about the grief.

[Image description: A two panel comic of characters from The Locked Tomb. Nona and Palamedes (in Camilla's body) sit at a table with plates of eggs. Pyrrha braids Nona's hair. They are in a worn-down apartment. Text says, "I bet on." Next, Pyrrha and Paul sit next to Nona, who is lying prone. They are in a cave lit with a single candle. The text continues: "losing dogs." End description]

"I asked the princess and Camilla Hect to kill me before Blood of Eden can do worse."

"Camilla said no. The princess said she would think about it. i am desperate."

The Sewers & The Stars, a new Hidden Isle adventure is now live on Kickstarter!

ends on February 17th '24 💧🌟

patient dying in the name of toxic yaoi as it should be

from the random clips and tumblr screenshots ive seen, i feel like dr house md has broken the hippocratic oath at least 3 times and a whole lot of other oaths more than that

idk just vibes

yeah i'd say at least 3 times

There will be Palestinian futures on Palestinian land.

The Siphoner 🩸 A character class for The Hidden Isle. You can preorder the TTRPG here

People really need to realise that “media can affect real life” doesn’t mean “this character does bad things so people will read that and start doing bad things” and actually means “ideas in fiction especially stereotypes about minority groups can affect how the reader views those groups, an authors implicit prejudices can be passed on to readers”

How fiction affects reality is about how it meshes with your internal templates for how the real world works.

Ratings are based on a rough estimate of when most people will have those templates form. For instance, there’s a standard for children’s media which states that you’re not supposed to include imitable violence more severe than an open-handed slap, because kids are just learning the overrides for the monkey-brain “if someone makes us angry, we hit them to send a message” drive. You can’t make a show for preschoolers that shows how to throw a punch, because they might very well just start punching people.

But you can show your average teenager as much punching as you want, and unless their parents REALLY fucked up, they won’t take it to mean “this is how you solve ANY problem, from a threat to your life, to someone looking at you funny.” When you can show the use of realistic guns to a person without them deciding that shooting people is a good idea depends on a lot of personal and cultural factors, but as a standard we can settle on people tend to agree that, as long as it doesn’t settle into reinforcing stereotypes as a possible invocation of “things that are okay only to defend your own life” or blatant war propaganda or similar exceptions, most adults can see all the violence they want - yes, even glorified violence - without turning into a violent menace themselves.

If you have it impressed upon you your whole life that killing people is bad - as you will, unless you have the worst kind of parents imaginable - you can watch your favorite action star kill tons of dudes, or play games that are just excuse plots for killing tons of dudes, or read about a million and a half creative ways to get away with killing tons of dudes, and you’re still not going to run out and kill tons of dudes or even think it might be okay to kill tons of dudes. This is because your mental template for how the world works strongly emphasizes “death = tragic; killing people = hurtful and bad”. Again, it might fuck with your head if the explanation for why killing tons of dudes is justified in the context of this piece of media aligns with common stereotypes of real people, or your own preexisting biases - this is how propaganda works - but even in THOSE cases a lot more factors have to align to get someone to the full extreme end and think “yes, killing tons of dudes irl is the answer to all my problems!”

It’s where people have weaker templates that’s really a problem. For example, most Americans have no idea that Cairo in the modern day like this:

…because they’ve been inundated with media that portrays Egypt as looking homogeneously like this:

And - and this is the important part - they have had little to no experience to tell them otherwise.

Now, I’m assuming the majority of the people reading this post don’t live in Cairo - if you do, take this shoutout! - and if you are in that majority that doesn’t, imagine if someone tried to pass something like this off as your own hometown. Obviously, you’ll call bullshit! You’ve seen that place and it’s nothing like that!

But if it’s a place you don’t know anything about beyond the fact that it exists and has these famous landmarks for these famous historical reasons, then anyone can…pretty much just say whatever they want from that baseline, no matter how absurd, and you will probably accept it as, if not a fact, at least a believable fictionalization with some basis in reality. At most, maybe you’ll go

This is how media creates and perpetuates stereotypes - by getting in where you don’t know better and forming your mental template. It can even work if you do have real-life counterexamples, when those real-life counterexamples are uncommon enough or you don’t spend enough time with them - if you know maybe 5 members of a minority group and none of them act like the 500 stereotyped examples you see on TV, you’re likely to end up thinking “okay, there are exceptions to the rule”, rather than “the rule is bullshit”.

This is why “honest, varied representation matters” and “not all fiction is 1:1 monkey-see-monkey-do propaganda and it’s really dickish to assume the worst of someone just because they like one (1) game that you see unfortunate implications in or something” are both statements that can and should coexist.

tragedy as a genre asks us repeatedly “why did this have to happen?”. why did medea kill her children? why did lear reject the only daughter who truly loved him? why cant estragon and vladimir simply walk away? we can accept the idea that these are events made inevitable by some facet of the characters personalities. we can argue that circumstances forced their hand. but ultimately we dont have these answers and thats why i think tragedy. is a genre so given to retellings and repetition. the why is tantalizing — maybe if we play it again, we can figure out where it went wrong. so anyways as always we’re back at hadestown’s “its a sad song, but we sing it anyway. to know how it ends, and still begin to sing it again, as if it might turn out this time …”

Hi everyone I just want to announce that this post is about AMC’s The Terror now. Thanks everyone who left insane tags on this post that helped convince me to watch it I finished it this morning and right now I’m starting it again from the beginning. Love&Light I feel deranged.

tragedy enjoyers when even good intentions lead to ruin

what makes harryanthe so funny is that ianthe and harrow are very much textually attracted to each other but neither is capable of being normal about it and this is because harrow is suffering from a lobotomy and is in love with a corpse meanwhile ianthe is absolutely dtf but is offput by harrow showing overt vulnerability because that makes things too easy and simplistic (and, more importantly, too real)

so instead they have this incredibly convoluted thing extant between them wherein harrow, amid intermittently blasting chunks and fighting off assassination attempts, is violently repressed but keenly aware of ianthe being both the only person she can feel anything resembling solidarity with and someone she is actively attracted to, all the while ianthe is acting wildly overfamiliar and unconcerned with boundaries and tries to kiss her after explicitly stating that she views and intends to treat harrow as a sister. then later says perhaps the most fucking earnest thing she has ever said to anyone that isn't corona

which is followed by harrow's reply of, "Go fuck yourself."

also the closest they ever got to sex was harrow slicing off ianthe's arm then growing her a new one out of bone (which she took genuine pleasure in growing, btw) which ianthe proceeded to gild. NOBODY IS DOING IT LIKE THEM.

Girl are you the Hays Code the way you consider media irredeemable if it depicts anything that strays away from the norm you're comfortable with or depicts anything morally questionable without definitively condemning it and anyone associated with it, therefore creating worse stories and content and making it difficult for people to engage with complicated issues from a nuanced and controlled perspective?