So many vows...they make you swear and swear. Defend the king. Obey the king. Keep his secrets. Do his bidding. Your life for his. But obey your father. Love your sister. Protect the innocent. Defend the weak. Respect the gods. Obey the laws. It's too much. No matter what you do, you're forsaking one vow or the other.
"problem plays" this "romances" that I'm proposing new and exciting Shakespearean Play Groupings for your amusement!
- The Bad Dad Triad: King Lear, Henry IV Part 1, Romeo and Juliet
- The "My Wife's A Floozy" Trifecta: Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, the Winter's Tale
- The "Me And My Shitty Little Minion Are About To Fuck Up Your Shit Hardcore" Trilogy: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Richard III, the Tempest
- The Falstaffiad: Henry IV part 1, Henry IV part 2, The Merry Wives of Windsor
- The "Holy Fuck There's Two of 'Em" Saga: Twelfth Night, the Comedy of Errors
- The "Dear Diary My Homoerotic Bullshit Has A Body Count Now" Series: Richard II, Julius Caesar, Coriolanus
- The "Why Are The Fucking Trees Trying To Kill Me. Hate This Shit" Trilogy: Macbeth, the Winter's Tale, As You Like It
Oh no-one’s surprised I’m team minion and floozy… in Shakespeare as in life…
academic papers about black sails
i've been able to find four (two in the same book) so far, i'll update the list as i encounter more
i found these as well :)
Razman, D. C. (2020) “Black Sails, Rainbow Flag: Examining Queer Representations in Film and Television” [click for pdf]
Srividhya Swaminathan, (2017) “The New Cinematic Piracy: Crossbones and Black Sails” (in ‘The Cinematic Eighteen Century: History, Culture, and Adaptation’ (2017, 1st ed.) edited by Srividhya Swaminathan and Steven W. Thomas)
Dirksen, S.J. (2019) “Constructing the Identity of the Popular Pirate: The Outlaw, Marginal Identities, and Utopia in Black Sails (2014-2017) and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (2013)”
Min-Chi Chen (2024) “Weaponizing Monstrosity: Starz’s Black Sails and the Power of Monstrous Narrative” (in Chapter 2 of ‘Monsters and Monstrosity in Media: Reflections on Vulnerability’, 23, 2024, edited by Yeojin Kim, Shane Carreon)
this probably isn't very canon compliant, but whatever!! I enjoyed drawing my girl in action ♥
(i don't have the book on hand to check what the setting was like, but everyone loves giant ocean-view windows SO.)
obviously I don't like the everpresent trope of wise and hypercompetent lesbian appears for two seconds to sort out hapless gay boy feelings. however, I do think it gets at something, which is that lesbians fucking love to give advice we are eminently unqualified to give.
so from now on I will only be accepting this trope if the instagram therapyspeak relationship advice is a) objectively wrong and b) coming from a lesbian who is actively ghosting at least two girls while crying about her ex-situationship from 5 years ago. thank you!
I need to see BDSM haters go on rants about the evils of capsaicin
It’s ridiculous to believe that anyone truly enjoys eating spicy food, capsaicin literally evolved as a deterrent to keep mammals from eating it… oh you “like” eating spicy food?? You “like” crying and your nose running at the table while you’re trying to just enjoy dinner? Just admit you have brain rot from watching too many episodes of Hot Ones and go…
I would never let someone eat spicy food in front of me… like that’s literally a chemical irritant that burns your tissue, anyone who would willingly let their partner—let alone ASSIST THEIR PARTNER!!!—in this act of obvious self-harm is an abuser. If I was on a date with someone and they ordered Sichuan hot pot I would simply get up and leave.
Nona the Ninth Chapter 13 // Chapter 27 // John 5:4
Or: John Gaius and Varun the Eater, a comparison. I'm not saying John is a Resurrection Beast. I'm just saying he shares a soul with one
Ok well I'M saying it.
He moves through the universe, chasing the one he blames for his planet's death. He feeds on Thalergenic planets as he goes. He even has heralds! Like -
Spider, web. Hand, finger. Finger, gesture.
Yeah, and you call it "hyperpotamous travel", Lord.
He is powered by the death of every single living thing on Earth. He ate all of them, not just Alecto. And - I still haven't read The Unwanted Guest, but I've heard the words "permeability of the soul" often enough.
It's been ten thousand years. If he wasn't a Resurrection Beast to start out -
- well, I do think the difference has ceased to matter much.
Rayne Fisher-Quann, no good alone
I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.
And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.
I hope you don't mind me adding to this very good post, but in general i think the financial supremecy of movies and (more recently) tv has lead a lot of people to assume that the best stories can be interchanged between mediums. That every book can be adapted into a movie, every light novel into an anime, every movie into a video game etc etc
and that's the same attitude that underlies all the 'the goal of fanfic is to file of the serial numbers and publish it' or 'fanfic isn't real writing because real writing is novels and fanfic is usually structurally so different from a novel' type of takes come from.
this assumption that the medium is largely coincidental to the story being told
when that's just not true.
the very best adaptations always change things, because mediums are not interchangeable, and they fundamentally shape the stories told in them.
there are things you can do in fanfic that are simply not possible in a traditional novel, because you're starting from that possition of love and knowledge, and because you aren't bound by the need to be canon compliant, so you can ask questions like 'if these characters met in other lives, under different circumstances, what would they be like? how different would they be? how much of what makes them them is tied to the circumstances they found themselves in?' or 'what was it like to not be the heroes, to not be actively involved in the cool exciting bits? what was it like to be a minor character, left behind to deal with the consequences' because your audience is already invested, they'll show up for questions like that in a way a movie or novel or tv audience wouldn't.
there are things you can do in a podcast or radio play that are not possible in visual mediums like film or tv, because you're relying on the audiences imagination. there's a reason the best radio comedy tends to be surreal, and the best podcasts tend to be horror, those are both genres that thrive when the audience's imagination is allowed to fill in blanks.
there are things you can do on TV that are not possible in a novel or a movie. the way WandaVision completely changed its visual style with each episode is something that would not work in any other genre, but it's essential to the story. TV usually exists in very defined seasons, but cannot traditionally be consumed all in one go, which is not true of almost any other medium, and that dictates a specific type of pacing. combine that with the fact that it's a visual medium, and you get something like the overarching stories of the 9th Doctor's season of Doctor Who. No other medium could have delivered the resolution to that storyline as effectively.
Video games can force the audience to consider their own part in events. No movie could do what Spec Ops did, when it gives you a button prompt to commit a war crime, and then turns around and asks you why? why did you do that? was it too easy? do you think it felt like this when the US government committed the exact same war crime within living memory? Was it easy then too? A novel or a movie could show you walker doing this terrible thing, but it could never convey the point with the same effective simplicity, and it could never make you the audience feel culpable. only the author is responsible for the actions of the characters in a novel, but in a game, it's the audience who bears that responsibility, and that allows for moral questions other mediums struggle to effectively convey.
Comics can tell stories that take three decades and ten different writers to tell. Movies can use silence more effectively than any other medium because cinemas give you a captive audience and close-ups means you can reliably assume they can see everything that's happening (unlike theatre, which can use silence, but can't assume everyone has a good view). Theatre provides real time audience interactivity and a very special and unique kind of suspension of disbelief. Professional wrestling can tell ongoing stories in real time over years or decades, and walk the line between fiction and reality. Novels can immerse you more fully in one person's view of the world than any other medium (which also allows for information to be hidden from the reader without it feeling cheap the way it can when a movie does the same thing). Live oral storytelling allows the story to be adapted on the fly to fit audience reactions, allows for infinite variations of the same story, because no two tellings will ever be identical.
Fanfic isn't a genre, not really. Fanfic has genres, but it isn't a genre in and of itself. Fanfic is a medium, and like all mediums, it offers storytelling tools that are unique to it, that it does better than any other medium. and as OP pointed out, one of the big ones is that it can assume both familiarity and love from the audience to the characters depicted. We can stray far further afield from where we started in fanfic than the original creator ever could, because our anchors are not the narrative, but the characters.
my contribution to the Commander Wake Parenting Discourse is that Wake is a mother only insofar as that makes her a MILF. hope this helps
I want whatever it is that these two have
Context! This is called a Jack and Jill! It's a contest in a style called West Coast Swing.
Here's the thing... it's ALL improv. The whole thing. And those two? Randomly matched.
Dance is a sport where strangers fall madly in love for a few minutes. And I need more all the time.
damn, what sorcery that she's doing that in BOOTS?
I’m sorry, wait stop. That was IMPROV???
Dance like this is a magic I just can’t fathom.
Oh yeah the fun thing about being even a base level performance dancer is that you can actively see their communication the entire time! Some of it is more obvious than other but if this was choreographed they wouldn’t need to communicate hardly at all. Lemme break down a few spots!
The moment in the beginning when they started dancing helped them set the tone and energy for eachother so they knew what type of dancing to expect, and they proceeded to pull from that vibe the entire time.
Around the quarter mark when they’re spinning around, green shirt looks at purple shirt’s feet, watching to see if purple was going to move. Purple then takes that and begins to move backwards, into the hand switch (which would have been far more fluid choreographed) and as purple raises their arm, green does the dramatic lean back utilizing the visual element of her hair. Unclear if purple necessarily was the reason but they were definitely asking for some sort of flair and green definitely delivered.
An easier one to see was that the trust fall was not planned but you could see the Very Direct Communication from the purple to the green offering that opportunity. Green didn’t have to take it but when they saw the opportunity they then positioned themselves and timed it with the music so the drop in the music coincided with their torso hitting purple’s arms.
Also the little coordinated butt wiggle at the end when green let purple lead was hilarious loved that.
There’s more but I don’t feel like giving a play-by-play but maybe y’all can see more of it now that I’ve pointed out examples! Remember folks, dancing with others is about communication!
This line killed me
Cam is flabbergasted 💥
Thank you tumblr for the inspo
it really is insane how waking up early will grant you access to some of the most beautiful sights and sensations in the world that will make you want to live forever, but only if you overcome the gauntlet of a thousand razors that is getting out of bed early. truly one of life's little saw traps.
i don't know how else to say it: jon snow comes from two long lines of reckless magical bullshit and is basically a melting pot of feral royal blood but that's less important than the fact that he was raised by ned stark.