Professorfangirl's Bordello of Learning

the first law of tragedies: the end is already written and inevitable. the second law of tragedies: your actions are all your own and you can choose to get off this ride whenever you want. the third law of tragedies: we both know that you are never going to do that.

Detail from the “unswept floor” mosaic made by Heraclitus, showing a mouse eating a walnut. 2nd century CE, now on display at the Vatican Museums.

Imagine trying to clean this floor–or even walk across it–and constantly wondering, “Wait. Is that one REAL?”

If you can’t find a place on your blog for Patrick Stewart in a bathtub dressed like a lobster, then your blog probably doesn’t deserve such majesty anyway.

It has returned to my dash and I cannot fight the compulsion to reblog…

the patrick lobster appears only once in a thousand years, reblog for good luck

Lobstrick is back. So am I.

They’re about to start astroturfing fandoms and it’s our job to make it the worst experience possible for netflix

The concept of astroturfing fandom is so fucking funny. Imagine them hiring some poor intern to crank out slash fic to upload to the archive so it can look like more people are writing fic for their shitty shows to get people interested. They have a staff whose full-time job it is to make gif sets and mood boards.

The best part will be when they manage to get the ball rolling with their planted stories only to watch in horror as the ABO starts rolling in, the serial killer AUs, their villains getting shipped and written into florists and baristas, the tentacle fan art, the biggest ship will be two rando side characters without last names who they’d planned to leave out of S2 but now they can’t, the show’s social media gets inundated by over-invested fans screaming at them and canceling them every day and they’ll be all WAIT WAIT NO NOT LIKE THAT THAT’S NOT HOW THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO GO and it’ll be like look buddy, you asked for this…

friendships online be like bro i would deactivate for you

Fanfic is the triumph of character-based relationship building over the need for clever plot or pretty cinematography. It says “I don’t care what they do; I care about what they feel, and how that makes me feel.” 

Somehow never thought about the photographer and -

- my God.

The real question: WHY IS PHOTOING THE PHOTOGRAPHER? 

Coraline is a masterfully made film, an amazing piece of art that i would never ever ever show to a child oh my god are you kidding me

Nothing wrong with a good dose of sheer terror at a young age

“It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It’s the strangest book I’ve written”

-Neil Gaiman on Coraline

@nightlovechild

This is a legit psychology phenomenon tho like there’s a stop motion version of Alice and Wonderland that adults find viscerally horrifying, but children think is nbd. It’s like in that ‘toy story’ period of development kids are all kind of high key convinced that their stuffed animals lead secret lives when they’re not looking and that they’re sleeping on top of a child-eating monster every night so they see a movie like Coraline and are just like “Ah, yes. A validation of my normal everyday worldview. Same thing happened to me last Tuesday night. I told mommy and she just smiled and nodded.”

Stephen King had this whole spiel i found really interesting about this phenomenon about how kids have like their own culture and their own literally a different way of viewing and interpreting the world with its own rules that’s like secret and removed from adult culture and that you just kinda forget ever existed as you grow up it’s apparently why he writes about kids so much

An open-ended puzzle often gives parents math anxiety while their kids just happily play with it, explore, and learn. I’ve seen it so many times in math circles. We warn folks about it.

Neil Gaiman also said that the difference in reactions stems from the fact in “Coraline” adults see a child in danger - while children see themselves facing danger and winning

i never saw so much push back from adults towards YA literature as when middle aged women started reading The Hunger Games. They were horrified that kids would be given such harsh stories, and I kept trying to point out the NECESSITY of confronting these hard issues in a safe fictional environment.

Also, in an interview, he said that Coraline was partially based on a story his not yet 6 year old daughter would tell him 

SAGAL: No. I mean, for example, your incredibly successful young adult novel “Coraline” is about a young girl in house in which there’s a hole in the wall that leads to a very mysterious and very evil world. So when you were a kid, is that what you imagined?

GAIMAN: When I was a kid, we actually lived in a house that had been divided in two at one point, which meant that one room in our house opened up onto a brick wall. And I was convinced all I had to do was just open it the right way and it wouldn’t be a brick wall. So I’d sidle over to the door and I’d pull it open.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: And it was always a brick wall.

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: But it was one of those things that as I grew older, I carried it with me and I thought, I want to send somebody through that door. And when I came to write a story for my daughter Holly, at the time she was a 4 or 5-year-old girl. She’d come home from nursery. She’d seen me writing all day. So she’d come and climb on my lap and dictate stories to me. And it’d always be about small girls named Holly.

SAGAL: Right.

GAIMAN: Who would come home to normally find their mother had been kidnapped by a witch and replaced by evil people who wanted to kill her and she’d have to go off and escape. And I thought, great, what a fun kid.

It’s anxious adults who desperately want to “soften” stories. Kids prefer the real thing: with monsters, bloodthirsty ogres and evil murderous stepmothers; where the littlest brother always wins and all the villains are horrendously punished in the end. The world is threatening to the eyes of a child, so they need a fictional universe where the little people have a fair chance against the big and strong.

This isn’t specifically about stop motion but it is about how sad or scary parts of movies aren’t really all that bad- IE the 80′s movies, particularly Don Bluth’s films. (X- The Melancholy of Don Bluth, by Meg Shields )

How the children’s animation of the 80’s made room for sadness, and what that taught us. 

There was a time when McDonalds used to give away VHS tapes with happy meals, and by some stroke of luck, one day my mom picked The Land Before Time. It was the first film to etch itself onto me ‐ the way film tends to with kids. I would recreate the plot with stuffed animals and parrot the lines to whoever would listen; I pawed that VHS box until the cardboard went soft.

A couple years ago, I saw that Land Before Time was playing on t.v. and couldn’t remember the last time I’d watched it all the way through. Within five minutes I was completely obliterated and sobbing into a throw pillow. This is a shared experience for children raised with Don Bluth: that as a kid, I could only clock a hazy sense that his films felt different from Disney fare, but that the articulations of this difference, and their ability to emotionally floor me, are something I’ve only become aware of in retrospect.

There was a regime change in animation during the 80’s. Quite literally in the form of Bluth’s official break with Disney in ’79, but in a more elusive sense with the landscape of what children’s animation during that decade felt like. For whatever reason, be it Bluth’s departure or a diseased managerial ethos in the wake of Walt’s passing, the 80’s were a mixed bag for Disney. Don’t get me wrong, they’re amiable and charming films, but The Fox and the Hound and The Great Mouse Detective are not classics. And for all its ambition, The Black Cauldron cannot be redeemed on technical merit. Disney would eventually yank itself out of its slump in ’89 with The Little Mermaid ‐ but animation during the 80’s, along with the childhoods of a slew of millennials, were definitively shaped by Bluth.

That there is a dark tenor to Bluth’s work has been thoroughly, albeit perhaps vaguely, noted, often citing individual moments of terror (cc: Sharptooth, you dick). While I don’t doubt that frightening and disturbing scenes contribute to an overall sense of darkness in Bluth’s work, I’m unconvinced that they’re at the root of what distinguishes his darker tone. There is, I think, a holistic sadness to Bluth films; a pervasive, and fully integrated melancholy that permeates his earlier work.

These stories are full of crystalline moments of narrative sadness; specific story moments at which I inevitably mutter a “fuck you Don Bluth,” and try not to cry. There’s Littlefoot mistaking his own shadow for his dead mother; Fievel sobbing in the rain (a Bluth mainstay) convinced that his family has abandoned him; Mrs. Brisby shuddering helplessly after she and the Shrew temporarily disarm the plow. Other plot points are less tear-jerking so much as objectively miserable: the cruelty of the humans in The Secret of NIMH; An American Tail’s intelligent allegory for Russian Jewish pogroms and immigration; Carface getting Charlie B. Barkin drunk and murdering him at the pier.

You know — FOR KIDS! 

Thematically, there is an ever-present air of death about Bluth’s work that is profoundly sad. Bones litter certain set-pieces; illness and age are veritable threats (shout out to Nicodemus’ gnarly skeleton hands); and characters can and do bleed. Critically, Bluth films don’t gloss over grief, they sit with it. From Littlefoot’s straight up depression following the on-screen death of his mom, to Mrs. Brisby’s soft sorrow at finding out the details of her husband’s death.

There is a space for mourning in Bluth’s stories that feels extra-narrative, and unpretentious. Critically, this is distinct from, say, wallowing. Bluth’s films have a ridiculously productive attitude towards mourning, most lucidly articulated through Land Before Time’s moral mouthpiece Rooter: “you’ll always miss her, but she’ll always be with you as long as you remember the things she taught you.” Disney meanwhile, tends to treat death as a narrative flourish, or worse, a footnote. And in comparison, even notable exceptions like Bambi and The Lion King seem immaturely timid to let palpable grief linger for longer than a scene, let alone throughout a film’s runtime.

Look at all the fun times they’re missing. 

Musically, James Horner and Jerry Goldsmith’s impossibly beautiful scores are laced with a forlorn undercurrent. In particular, Horner’s tonal dissonance in The Land Before Time theme punches the Wagner-lover in me in the throat (admittedly, a good thing). Further to this, the first half of Goldsmith’s “Escape from N.I.M.H,” is reminiscently Tristan and Isolde-y. And while I’m here, I would also like to formally issue a “fuck you for making me cry in public” to American Tail’s “The Great Fire,” which when combined with visuals, is nothing short of devastating.

Speaking of visuals, backdrops of grim and vast indifference dot Bluth’s work; from the twisted Giger-esque caverns of the rats’ rosebush, to the urban rot of a thoroughly unglamorous New York and New Orleans. That these landscapes are in a state of decay is particularly dismal; there is a tangible barrenness, a lack of the warmth our characters are desperately hoping to find by their film’s end. These are depressed and morose spaces ‐ and that they are so seemingly unnavigable and foreboding makes them all the more compelling, and narratively resonant.

The way Bluth uses color is also notable, with dark, earthy tones prevailing throughout only to be blown out quite literally with the golden light characteristic of Bluth’s hard-earned happy endings. Before Littlefoot and friends reach The Great Valley, an event marked by gradually illuminating god-rays, they must slug it out through the parched browns, blues and pitch of their prehistoric hellscape. Like Charlie’s final ascendance into heaven, Fievel must endure similarly muted shades until he is finally (finally) reunited with his family and soaked in glitter ‐ a level of Don Bluth conclusion-sparkles perhaps only rivaled by the radiance of Mrs. Brisby’s amulet as she Jean Grey’s her homestead to safety at the end of NIMH. Because Bluth leans into darker, less saturated tones, these effervescent conclusions are all the more impactful, which speaks in part to the methodology of Bluth’s melancholy.

The plucky leads of Bluth’s early films are all fighting for the same thing: family. From Mrs. Brisby’s persistence to protect her children, to Charlie’s (eventually) selfless love for Anne-Marie, these are characters in search of home. Invariably, each of these characters gets their happy ending, but they have to go through hell to get there, literally in Charlie’s case. In a recent interview, critic Doug Walker asked Bluth if there was any truth to the rumor that he thinks you can show children anything so long as there’s a happy ending, to which Bluth replied:

“[If] you don’t show the darkness, you don’t appreciate the light. If it weren’t for December no one would appreciate May. It’s just important that you see both sides of that. As far as a happy ending…when you walk out of the theatre there’s [got to be] something that you have that you get to take home. What did it teach me? Am I a better person for having watched it?”

Melancholy isn’t just a narrative device for Bluth, it’s a natural part of navigating life, of searching for wholeness, and becoming a better person. Bluth acknowledges sadness in a way that never diminishes or minimizes its existence; he invites melancholy in, confesses its power, and lets it rest. Sadness is, for Bluth, an essential characteristic of the world and living in it. That is a wholly edifying message for kids, delivered in a vessel that is both palatable and unpatronizing. For this reason, among innumerable others, Bluth’s work has immense value as children’s entertainment…even if it means crying into a throw pillow twenty years later.

Reposting, because the value of sorrow is drastically underrated.

Adults need to be comforted.

Children need to be prepared.

Gods, just reading this and remembering these scenes has me a little choked up. This is a fantastic analysis of Bluth’s films and the condition of childhood in general.

@marrow-bone

I of course both read Coraline and watched the film as a young adult with much younger siblings, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I find Gaiman’s novels read a little like film scripts and translate so well to film that I think the movie was honestly better and there was very little of the novel that didn’t translate well. Which I expect is related to his early work with graphic novels and comics like The Sandman.

I was responsible for a much younger sibling at a very young age, so I had to mature fast, which put me in the uncomfortable position of knowing exactly how children think, while having to think like an adult to assume that level of responsibility; having adult expectations put on me, and still being treated like a child.

I distinctly recall promising myself I wouldn’t forget what it was like to be a child, and I would never treat a child with the condescension with which I was treated by a lot of adults in my life. That any time I had to deal with children I would do my best to meet them at their level, as opposed to talking down to them.

Don’t think they can’t tell the difference. They can.

I would like to take a moment to thank Bluth for literately having a hand in practically all of my childhood movies that are very near and dear to my heart.

80s Bluth films told stories in worlds where bad things could and did happen to good people. Even when bad things happen in Disney films (see: Mufasa’s death) there’s always some kind of justice for it. And sure, Bluth does have the big narrative thwarting of the villains, but…

The Russian Cats never any justice for their feline pogrom on the Jewish mice An American Tail. There’s no come-uppance for the guy who essentially runs a sweatshop where Fievel ends up briefly, or for the street kids who bully him. There are countless mice left in poverty and servitude at the end of the movie, even if they dealt with the worst of the cats.

Littlefoot’s mother’s death never feels like it’s ‘avenged’, and all the kids’ trauma and fear from having been separated from their families is ever-present through the film.

Jonathan Brisby died and his absence in Secret of NIMH was palpable even to me as a child in a way none of the dead parents of Disney fare ever were.

Anne-Marie’s years of having no one to care for her don’t feel undone even when she’s happily adopted, and even if she gets a family at the end and Charlie doesn’t go to hell, Charlie still dies.

Even in some that aren’t considered as classic, in Rock-a-Doodle I wasn’t sure as a kid that the family’s farm would be okay and the villain felt actually menacing, like some of the farm’s creatures might actually die. Even Thumbelina carried the feeling of… loss and death with it, through the natural world and the natural order of things, even if everything ends happily.

Bad things happen in the world and bad things happen in Don Bluth films, and that made them feel so much more real than any Disney movie I ever saw as a kid. (I think Rescuers, Rescuers Down Under, Bambi, The Fox And The Hound, and Great Mouse Detective were the closest Disney came to feeling like that to me, growing up, and even then it wasn’t the same.)

They were deeply important to my development and I think every kid should see them before they turn 10, frankly.

G.K. Chesterton wrote (paraphrase), “Fairy tales do not tell children dragons exist. Children already know the dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”

“There’s a drowned mayfly in a puddle by Mrs. Hudson’s bins.

She left awhile ago, is how they think of it, but isn’t far off.

In the churchyard where Sherlock goes, once a week, or they both do.

Leave a bouquet and a biscuit for the birds.

Assure her it didn’t fall, her country; they won’t let it.”

Quote from aderyn’s masterful The Bees of Britain which inspired the drawing. I think I chose about the saddest scene out of a lot of brilliant, evocative ones. But this one spoke to me the most.

Also, I decided to post both the finished drawing (didn’t go for colour in the end, just added some more detail) and the wip version because I like both. Also professorfangirl wrote a beautiful comment on the wip, comparing it with aderyn’s writing [x].

Thanks for everything, Una Stubbs.

I didn’t come back to Tumblr after five years just to be reminded of how simple and lovely and brilliant fanworks can be, how generous and affecting, how honest and true, and how lonely I’ve been without them, and of course that’s exactly why I came back.

Scarborough Faire by kayscreativecollection

The conjunction of brutal modern concrete and cables with lilting medieval melody just kills me. Lyrical af.