Apparently they're selling post content to train AI now so let us be the first to say, flu nork purple too? West motor vehicle surprise hamster much! Apple neat weed very crumgible oysters in a patagonia, my hat. Very of the and some then shall we not? Much jelly.
i'm curious! how do YOU keep track of ideas you like but don't have the time or inclination to write yet? where do you store them? how much information do you jot down?
your last words before you die are the 3rd line of the last song you listened to. what are we saying ladies?
I have loved reading your posts on various fiction from Christian perspective. I am wondering your opinion on when fantasy/"magic" fiction becomes too much? I used to encounter a lot of people talking about how basically -anything- fantasy was evil. I have struggled with scrupulosity OCD for many years now so I tend to think things towards a legalistic lens. I'd like to be able to enjoy fantasy again, while carefully discerning, so I'd love to hear what you think are the merits/limits of fantasy
Hi! First off, Jesus said: "These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world." When you're wrestling with scrupulousity, sometimes it helps to see or hear out loud the reminder that life in Christ is one that's supposed to give you peace, not constant worry about doing everything right--even if you've heard that before and you already know it, sometimes it can help to hear it over again from outside your own head. So there it is! 🤝
Next: thank you for asking me! I'm no professional. But someone did ask me this question once before. I am having a hard time finding it on my blog right now, otherwise I'd link to it, but I'll try to summarize at the end of this post!
EDIT: You asked me to talk about the merits and limits of fantasy and I got carried away explaining why fantasy fiction is not outright evil according to the Bible. I moved that to the end of the post 😅 here's what I think the merits are:
All of Reality, our world, our timeline, was invented by God. That makes Him the storyteller, us His characters, and reality His narrative. Just like any storyteller, He made up a system of rules for His world: rules like, "humans sink in water," and "humans can't be cured of sickness by touching other humans," and "the weather doesn't change just because humans tell it to." Then God, the storyteller, broke His own world-building rules. On purpose. He wrote Himself (Jesus) into the story as a human who COULD walk on water and COULD heal other humans with a touch and COULD tell the weather what to do, and it obeyed.
In fantasy stories, when a character can break the established rules of the created world, we call that "magic." We call it "magic" when the storyteller brings in a supernatural element to show that this character is special, powerful, capable, set apart from all the others.
So that's what I think the merits are. Fantasy stories have a special kind of closeness to The Storyteller Who Invented Stories, because of that very element of "make the rules then bring in rule-breaking specialness" that He uses.
That's where you get Gandalf, or even the Fairy Godmother, or of course Aslan and the Deep Magic.
The limitations to the genre, I would say, is that fantasy stories are very tempting for storytellers' egos. Because of Tolkien, there's this generation of storytellers who think that inventing a fantasy world with rules and races and magical systems and cultures and, to sum it all up, a whole universe of their own design, is the POINT.
They think the themes and the message of their story comes second to how thorough and clever they can be with their made-up magical systems, or fantasy-race-relations, or made-up languages.
Basically, in no other genre have I observed storytellers getting so excited to play god-of-their-own-clever-world than in fantasy. Then they forget that the important part of a story is the message, not the brain that's capable of inventing worlds and languages and cool-sounding names and ancestries. What they have to say basically gets lost in how flashy and cool they can be while saying it.
But that's another soap box for another time. Those are basically the merits and limitations, I think, broad-strokes.
On to the Biblical worldview for magic in stories below!
they should invent a yearning for love that is tolerable btw
Imo one of the best things the Star Wars prequels did was establish how much Anakin/Vader *wanted* he and Padme’s baby. Because if it HAD been written as him never knowing she was pregnant, or not caring much because he was Too Much of a Man in War to really give a shit that he was going to have a kid (both of which are things people have suggested would have been *better* somehow), I don’t think it would have added as much to his relationship with Luke as it did. Vader doesn’t love Luke just as an extension of Padme, or in an obligatory, familial way, or even as a last connection to the person he was way.
Vader loves Luke because he’s always loved Luke, from the moment he knew there was going to be a Luke to love. He wants to know Luke because he’s always wanted to know him. He wants to be a part of Luke’s life, because he never had any intention not to be. That’s important. That’s powerful shit.
“Vader loves Luke because he’s always loved Luke, from the moment he knew there was going to be a Luke to love.”
Why am I crying over this? Pull yourself together.
Luke is the son he thought he killed
sometimes you just need to fall down a rabbit hole of the YouTube content you consumed between the ages of 14-18 and question your entire personality
i love the term "unwell"... theres something very very wrong with you. not saying what tho
Nobody talk to me unless it is about Tyler Clancy and Josh
behind every hot girl is a tbr of 100+ books
brought a poem to the gun fight
Losing my mind over the gospel of Luke being like “they wrapped his body in linen cloth and laid him in a tomb” after the beginning of the story being “they wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger” like
I’m absolutely feral
even better parallel when you know that the man who took jesus' corpse down and took him for burial's name was Joseph
even better parallel when you know that the “swaddling clothes” was Joseph’s burial wraps because it was custom for Jews to wear burial wraps on long journeys as a precaution if they perished while traveling
literally anything handmade is so dope. idc what it is it could be anything. a quilt, a painting, a basket, a sweater, a wooden table, a shed, a meal. how magical
Candace got fired bc she wouldn’t stop talking smack about Taylor Swift truther