amy ross

Also printing up a set of "over-commitment to the bit" for when they ask about my greatest weakness.

everyone is entitled to their own opinions but if we ever meet i will kill you

seriously if you look at this post and you have a dissenting opinion i have zero doubt in my heart that you are god’s mistake and a fluke in the grand design

i love being up early but i love being up late. and i love getting lots of sleep. what now.

so don’t get me wrong because a lot of arthurian stuff is super misogynistic. but it’s never really in the damsel in distress way you expect. like the most helpless damsel is lancelot trapped and crying in a tower, completely useless, until this random girl who made him behead a guy in front of her fifty pages ago rolls up with a pickax and rope and is like “ok I’m minecrafting you out of here.” and this works.

Another direction you’ll see this go is, like… okay, so in Arthurian texts, violence is very much The Province of Men. But women often want violence done for one reason or another, so they’re out there asking knights to fight such-and-such for them & the knights are of course honor-bound to accept under certain conditions, which by genre convention are easy to engineer.

All of this means that one of the standard female roles in Arthurian romance is “quest-giver”. And in some texts, this can drift from “these are damsels in distress and the knights must help them in various ways” to “it kind of seems like the women are the ones who actually know what’s going on & the knights are just being led along to wherever they’re supposed to be”.

It’s still ultimately an example of misogyny and strict gender roles, but it ends up often looking pretty different from the stock “damsel in distress” scenario people expect.

...Is the woman in Arthurian myth who Wants Violence Done but must conscript a man to actually do it the literary ancestress of the modern Femme Fatale? Discuss.

She slipped into my office that night like a demon into the mind of a pious monk, seductive and dripping with heresies. Her gown and headress were of rich silk befitting a maiden, but her eyes were cold and sharp as the executioner's sword, and her lips as red as the apple that tempted Eve. Her legs, presumably, went all the way up, but the aforementioned gown was floor-length, so it's hard to say. Also she'd ridden a horse into the building for some reason, which was quite distracting.

"Sir Knight," she said, dismounting and retrieving something from her saddlebag, "I have a job for you." She tossed a severed head onto my desk.

I peered at the severed head. It had noble features, and had managed to land exactly on top of one of the stains left by previous severed heads. "How did you find me?" I asked. "I swapped my red shield for a blue one; the disguise should be impenetrable."

"The hermit told me where you'd be", she answered in a voice like the bells on a horse's harness before battle.

That tracks. Those hermits are always poking their noses into my business. "How may I serve you, fair lady?" I asked. "I'd kneel, but my armor's gone a bit rusty in the legs."

"The Baron D'Iverjoure has slain my lover," she said, gesturing at the head, the rings on her fingers clinking like manacles in a wicked king's dungeon. "I need you to avenge him."

"I have no quarrel with the Baron D'Iverjoure," I said, knowing as the words echoed in my helmet that I was saying them just for the form of it and I'd end up taking this quest regardless. "I have heard he is an honorable man."

"That may be," said the damsel, in tones as lovely as a reliquary and just as filled with death, "but you took an oath to obey the next lady to ask you a favor, and I'm calling it in."

I silently cursed my habit of swearing rash vows. They always get me in trouble. But you know how that goes. "Your wish is my command, milady."

She nodded and remounted her horse with the help of her two servants who I hadn't bothered to mention before now. "I will listen for news of your success," she said as she left.

That's the way it is with damsels; they always know about the oaths. Even the ones you spoke into a dented chalice, empty of wine, after everyone else had left the feast. And now I've got another quest I can't turn down without losing my honor.

Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944)

Vote for her in @hotvintagepoll

I resent the inevitable consequences the second law of thermodynamics has on my tea and the entropy of the universe. It always happens too damn soon.

The hell do you mean “use a tea light” you’re telling me those things can be used to heat tea???

Fam I’ve been lied to and deceived

Wait please what are you being told, this has raised many questions about tea lights for me.

Apparently the way you’re supposed to use tea lights is like this

Which no one ever told me is possible or exists and might now become my villain origin story after suffering years of cold tea

I'm sorry they're what

They heat tea. They heat tea because they’re tea lights. They’re named that way because they’re literally devices to keep your tea warm and somehow no one has ever told me this and they’re tea lights to heat tea and I might just—[CENSORED]

I’m glad we’re all having a normal one today folks

Masterpost of Free Gothic Literature & Theory

Classics Vathek by William Beckford Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë The Woman in White  & The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu The Turn of the Screw by Henry James The Monk by Matthew Lewis The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin The Vampyre; a Tale by John Polidori Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe Confessions of an English Opium-Eater by Thomas De Quincey The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson Dracula by Bram Stoker The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Short Stories and Poems An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience by William Blake The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Pre-Gothic Beowulf The Divine Comedy  by Dante Alighieri A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe Paradise Lost by John Milton Macbeth by William Shakespeare Oedipus, King of Thebes by Sophocles The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster

Gothic-Adjacent Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen The Wendigo by Algernon Blackwood Jane Eyre & Villette by Charlotte Brontë Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems by Coleridge and Wordsworth The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens The Idiot & Demons (The Possessed) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Man in the Iron Mask by Alexandre Dumas Moby-Dick by Herman Melville The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells

Historical Theory and Background The French Revolution of 1789 by John S. C. Abbott Shakespearean Tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth by A. C. Bradley The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance by Edith Birkhead On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History by Thomas Carlyle Demonology and Devil-Lore by Moncure Daniel Conway Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism by Inman and Newton On Liberty by John Stuart Mill The Social Contract & Discourses by Jean-Jacques Rousseau Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle by Frederick Wright

Academic Theory Introduction: Replicating Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Science and Culture by Will Abberley Viewpoint: Transatlantic Scholarship on Victorian Literature and Culture by Isobel Armstrong Theories of Space and the Nineteenth-Century Novel by Isobel Armstrong The Higher Spaces of the Late Nineteenth-Century Novel by Mark Blacklock The Shipwrecked salvation, metaphor of penance in the Catalan gothic by Marta Nuet Blanch Marching towards Destruction: the Crowd in Urban Gothic by Christophe Chambost Women, Power and Conflict: The Gothic heroine and “Chocolate-box Gothic” by Avril Horner Psychos’ Haunting Memories: A(n) (Un)common Literary Heritage by Maria Antónia Lima ‘Thrilled with Chilly Horror’: A Formulaic Pattern in Gothic Fiction by Aguirre Manuel The terms “Gothic” and “Neogothic” in the context of Literary History by O. V. Razumovskaja  The Female Vampires and the Uncanny Childhood by Gabriele Scalessa Curating Gothic Nightmares by Heather Tilley Elizabeth Bowen, Modernism, and the Spectre of Anglo-Ireland by James F. Wurtz Hesitation, Projection and Desire: The Fictionalizing ‘as if…’ in Dostoevskii’s Early Works by Sarah J. Young Intermediality and polymorphism of narratives in the Gothic tradition by Ihina Zoia

@nightingale-keats

The littlest things we know to be small = debut literary fiction

The dark wife: thriller, adapted into a Hulu original

The mailman’s niece = historical fiction

The mailman of Warsaw = also historical fiction but about war

The gate of wind = fantasy

The gate of wind and bones = young adult fantasy

A gathering of pelicans = mystery, part of a long running series that takes up a whole shelf at the library

The Group Project Partner Gambit = romance with a cartoon cover

Wendy Jenkins is Scared of Commitment = romance with a cartoon cover of gay people

this is my magnum opus

happy what fucking day is it now friday

Bear Selfies Captured By Camera Traps

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

Constantly thinking about this thing John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats said about the song “Love, Love, Love”.

The point of the song is, you know, that we are fairly well damaged by the legacy of the Romantic poets–that we think of love as this, you know, thing that is accompanied by strings and it’s a force for good, and if something bad happens then that’s not love. And the therapeutic tradition that I come from–I used to work in therapy–you know, also says that it’s not love if it feels bad. I don’t know so much about that. I don’t know that the Greeks weren’t right. I think they were–that love can eat a path through everything–that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself, you know. I mean, my stepfather loved his family, right? Now he mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us. And, you know, well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing a lot of what I perceive as terrible damage in the way people talk about this–love is this benign, comfortable force. It’s not that. It’s wild, you know?

Yoooo he just changed the game

Oh, this is really neat, this is the same thing they did in Sh! The Octopus in 1937 to do this transformation scene. In black & white, the color of your light can hide makeup, then all you have to do is flip the color, and the audience just sees the difference in the light levels, but cannot see the color shift. The quick explanation for why this works is the blue makeup absorbs red light, looking very dark when only red light is present, but also looks about the same as relatively fair skin when only blue light is present. Same goes for the colors the other way.

Ahh, I think that they had this in one of the early Jekyll and Hyde adaptations as well. :)

Twilight Zone used this trick too, in The Howling Man, where this guy morphs into the Devil.

And again in Long Live Walter Jameson, where this guy loses his artificial youth

I think the first time it was used was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in 1931.

God, I love practical effects

impossible to find a frankenstein recipe online that doesn't start with a freakin novel about the guy's early life in geneva... just gimme the ingredients and method

Miniature Crochet Guinea Pig //  ObscurelySmall

“available with premium subscription” “will be removed on the 31st” “available free with ads” “rent 4.99 buy 20.00″ “not available in your country” “not available on this device” what if every streaming service fucking killed itself and films ran around their fields free and organic in their natural state