eveeyones got it wrong your mid 20s arent for going to the club or partying or picking up new crafts. your 20s are for discovering how much more autistic you are than you thought you were in high school
Learning to understand that when hannibal is trending, its not because big news or anything important happened, its just our collective autism syncing up
2x09 || 2x12 || 3x06
Hannibal and Will + tying each other up
it's such a bummer that losing control of your emotions only makes the entire situation worse in really embarrassing personal ways. losing control of my emotions should give me pyrokinesis.
beautiful caffeine on an empty stomach I'm going to live forever
hopital
KRISTEN STEWART & KATY O'BRIAN for Them Magazine (March 19, 2024)
1x11 || 3x06
please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!
gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.
SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:
diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.
non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.
the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.
now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.
if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.
if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.
this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.
it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.
but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.
sometimes fandom seems to struggle with the concept that...people can be kind/"good people" in some situations and very very not kind/not "good people" in others.
I feel like there's this urge to either write off the positive behavior as "fake" or to find a way to ignore/explain away/write out the negative behavior. and I personally find this really really irritating in both directions, actually
I've definitely noticed this, where a lot of fandom folks like to have characters neatly sorted into "good" and "bad" boxes and will toss out any evidence that complicates that tidy categorization -- if a character is deemed "good", then any unkind behavior is justified or handwaved. If a character is "bad", then even their good parts are demeaned and treated as a front or ignored completed.
A whole lotta fandom hates dialectic morality, and it's personally really frustrating for me, both in terms of how flattened a lot of characterization ends up being as a result, and how utterly divorced this is from the reality of human beings being contradictory and messy.
Hannibal (2013-2015) Anatomy of a Hug by Luna Lu
my favorite kind of gay sex is gay sex where they’re not actually having sex and they’re doing another activity that is obviously supposed to be gay sex
what's so striking to me about younger queer generations rn isn't the lack of knowledge about queer history, but the complete unwillingness to engage with it, when confronted with an identity or history they haven't heard of before they react with disgust rather than curiosity. (for example) instead of asking where the leather pride flag came from and what the leather community is and represents they immediately question the need for something like that to exist, not even willing to listen and learn from both elders and peers. this is also more broadly a problem in leftist spaces in general, being reactionary is somehow the default now, and anything that's different or unknown must be an attack and bad. really hoping y'all manage to grow out of this deeply conservative way of interacting with the world.
Fascinated by the way that everything tumblr fandom doesn't like miraculously becomes the fault of those pesky "straight women"/"straight girls"TM.
Methinks you know very well that on this blue website here, a large share of the people producing the content you don't like aren't gonna be straight - and many of them are not women either. Mesuspects even that you're using that word (straight) as a distraction from the demographic that you're really blaming for whatever is pissing you off (women). And that you don't even check whether the people you are mad at are women, or how big the share of women is among this group and how big the share of straight women is. And that you're pointing out their gender specifically because you think it will further discredit the value of the content you don't like. (But you also gotta assert that they must be straight - because otherwise it would be misogyny)
And to make this clear, this is not the defence of Straight Girls. It's the "straight until proven otherwise" attitude towards women that I find interesting because I believe it ties back into the deep-rooted cultural notion that women are too shallow to be individuals.
Kinda reminds me of the thing people like James Somerton do where they just assert every female author who writes stuff they don't like must be straight. Or where people specifically must point out that something is written for/written by housewives, to show how bad and silly it is. While what they really mean is that for one: They mentally cannot conceptualise a woman being anything other than exactly what society made her to be and wants her to be. Because clearly, women lack the depth for such individuality. For such an evident manifestation of their unique personhood. No matter how often people like the Love Simon author came out publicly because they were suddenly confronted with the narrative that they must be straight. She must be straight because she is a woman.
And what they also really mean is that if a work appears shallow to them (and I'm not saying it isn't, I'm not saying that anything written by a woman is magically a deep and complex masterpiece) and if that work happens to have been written by a woman, the fact that she is a woman woman must be the reason why this work is shallow - because woman are such silly, shallow creatures. When a man produces a shallow work, it's an outlier, it's his individual failing, it is coincidental. But women are considered shallow until proven otherwise; shallow by default. And what people who do this also-also mean is that if a woman produced something they don't like, there is no point in critiquing this work on the basis of its intellectual merit (or lack thereof). Because these darned harlots are merely driven by their stupid carnal desires anyway (which are obviously a lot more silly and shallow than anyone else's carnal desires. Because women!) So one just has to point out the gender of the person who produced it. Or at least the gender they assume this person has based on their own misogynistic exceptions.