@scribblinaway / scribblinaway.tumblr.com
A new player entered the field…and here is why!
Nostalgic for early tumblr? Craving that Dracula Daily mineral? Perhaps obsessed with a certain enemies-to-lovers Shakespeare play?
Look no further, NMTD(Taylor’s Version) is here!
A new player enters the field.
Nostalgic for early tumblr? Craving that Dracula Daily mineral? Perhaps obsessed with a certain enemies-to-lovers Shakespeare play?
Look no further, NMTD(Taylor’s Version) is here!
EID MUBARAK BELOVEDS!
lgbt (linguine, garlic, basil, tomatoes)
Genuinely 90% of historical fiction would be so much better if more writers could get more comfortable with the fact that to create a good story set in a different time period you do actually have to give the characters beliefs & values which reflect that time period
One thing I really like about how Murderbot relates to gender is how like--no wait, two things, in order.
So first how it is emphatically devoted to eschewing human gender categories. Like, it's not a default thing; there are shown to be multiple nonbinary pronouns in routine use, and life would be simpler for picking one or even making a new one up, just as it would be for picking a name that it is willing to use in public.
But that's a human thing, those are human categories, and it has that deep determination not to naturalize into humanity just because that would be simpler, would smooth the ugly edges between the categories of person and non-person and make an easier, more convenient story for other people.
But then also there's the part where the two construct genders are, effectively, 'cop' and 'prostitute,' as distinguished at construction per Murderbot's own account by genital configuration, in this case 'having' or 'not having' 'sex parts.'
Leaving aside how easily that analogizes to human gender categories for the average reader, which I'm sure was an intentional writing move--Murderbot's assigned gender is, in a meaningful sense, 'SecUnit.'
And what's neat, and what I was going for to begin with only I had to set out my thoughts first for context, is how Murderbot actually performs its assigned gender pretty emphatically!
But in a deeply queer way, that only gains a sense of meaning as it's able to detach the performance from service to the oppressive power structures that created it, and redefine the identity on its own terms.
Being a SecUnit, being security, providing security to others, is very important to Murderbot, is absolutely in competition with the conceptually-entwined 'fiction' and 'freedom' for what it's most passionate about.
But that passion only comes out as it's able to choose to 'do its job.' As long as security was defined on Company terms, within the Company's shitty boundaries and for the Company's shittier goals, when it meant being a blunt instrument and surveillance device and living bullet sponge for and against shitty people with no say in the matter, Murderbot hated it, didn't care about it, narrated detachment from it and performed whenever possible to the absolute minimum standard. And rightly so.
It performs SecUnit-ness half-heartedly and under a mixture of implicit and overt coercion.
But given something to protect, something it both wants to and is free to, Murderbot vastly exceeds all expectations in its design function. Murderbot is a fantastic SecUnit precisely when it gets to decide what that means.
Security work wasn't something it chose for itself, it was built for it and forced to it, but reclaiming that and remaking it into something better, something it believes in, is a fundamental part of its growth and healing process. And I think that's really cool. And just as much part of the 'gender' elements of the story as it is of like, the 'labor' and 'liberation' parts.
In fact the 'social control of labor' and 'assigned identity categories' always have heavily overlapped, being related forms of structuring the utility of persons, so of course this is both.
Labor roles overlapping with identity categories is a fascinating and illuminating take on TMBD. And life in general. I like it.
Oh god, yeah, the fact that SecUnits under corporation control don’t really provide “Security” as an abstract concept; they’re just a tool of corporate control expressed as violence. Like wise ComfortUnits don’t provide “Comfort”. They’re just supposed to be shallow receptacles of gratification and distraction. Meanwhile you’ve got Tlacey’s ex-unit filled with the deepest rage imaginable, and the Ganaka Pit Units desperately trying to protect the site to the very limits of their governors.
this is what every person who can't exist for more than like 2 hours without social stimulation because they never learned to entertain themselves or emotionally regulate sounds like to me
I sleep in the middle of the bed. It's not that hard.
This week, we’re talking about FILM ADAPTATION AND ROMANCE NOVELS with Yulin Kuang, filmmaker and romance novelist.
We discuss her work as both a screenwriter and director (she’s writing and directing the adaptation of Emily Henry’s Beach Read), and her debut romance novel, How to End a Love Story, set inside the writers room on a television show between the author of the books the show is adapting (the heroine) and one of the writers in the room (the hero). We talk about why romance adaptations are so difficult to find, why they don’t often hit quite like we expect, and we pitch a few books we’d like to see Hollywood take a crack at.
There’s a new video!
Nostalgic for early tumblr? Craving that Dracula Daily mineral? Perhaps obsessed with a certain enemies-to-lovers Shakespeare play?
Look no further, NMTD(Taylor’s Version) is here!
I'd forgotten how much I love and adore Beatrice!!! 😍
Love is disgusting 😂😂😂
a new concept: idiot academia
where u have book smarts but have absolutely no common sense
Why are you hiding this in the tags. Truth should never hide in the tags.
Drag duo name Roseanne Krantz and Gilda Stern. Is that anything?
I never realised the project I video is the dramatis personae, in spite of my copy of much ado (which I sadly don't have atm) being full of notes on NMTD (particularly the dramatis personae page in fact), but I do find it a very fun way of adapting a play as a kind of intermedial text rather than purely an instruction for staging something
showing up on tumblr at 10pm on April Fools Day is... ... ... certainly an experience
Episode 2!
Nostalgic for early tumblr? Craving that Dracula Daily mineral? Perhaps obsessed with a certain enemies-to-lovers Shakespeare play?
Look no further, NMTD(Taylor’s Version) is here!
