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Many lgbt teenagers and young adults growing up on the internet today have socially conservative beliefs that they voice at all times that they got from their conservative parents which they’ve never challenged because they think the life experience of being gay or trans makes them politically progressive

This is why I hate it when people say something homophobic and then go “so you’re really accusing me, a whole ass lesbian, of being homophobic 🙄” like yeah

There's a model of culture that I like to cite for this idea, called the Iceberg Model:

The LGBT youth (and young atheists, too) will cut off the stuff "above the water" but not really examine the stuff down below that line that they have as part of their upbringing.

So you get young LGBT people making comments like OP cited, or young atheists acting with an Evangelical persecution complex, and going, "Don't call me Culturally Christian!"

This is the sort of thing I keep talking about when I’m saying identity is not the same as ideology.

Who you identify as (who you are) says absolutely nothing about what you believe (your ideology). 

Same goes for any subcategory.

“I can’t be racist, I’m black.” If you're making “ching-chong” jokes about Asian people, you’re still racist.

“I’m can’t be misogynistic, I’m a trans woman.” If you’re slut-shaming sex workers, you’re misogynistic.

“I can’t be queerphobic, I’m non-binary.” If you’re saying bi/pan/trans people can’t bring their hetero partner to Pride, gueeeess what.

Punching down within your own culture is still punching down.

Also people disagreeing with you doesn’t mean they’re any kind of -phobic if the argument has nothing to do with your identity. You’d think this is obvious but some insecure/unhealed people really do use that attack against others as soon as they encounter any disagreement or conflict. And the tone of discourse these days encourages people to believe those accusations without questioning.

I know unicorns in modern media are kind of relegated to cutsie, MLP, rainbow plastic toys, or shitting rainbows, 'lets go to candy mountain' but man. I WISH more fantasy media would put them in unironically. There is so much symbolic and narrative potential in a creature that is, depending on your mythology:

The thing about Cottagecore is that is a fetishized aesthetic of country life, divorced from labor and idealized by a primarily urban audience with a backward looking ethos of tradition. They are not prepared for the stresses of a rural life: farming; harvesting; tapping pumpkins to ensure none of them have been replaced with flesh; losing out on income by having to use one of your pigs in a blood sacrifice to paint protective sigils over your doors and windows; checking cracks and chimneys for the flesh-vines of the Pumpkin Lord; having to decide, before the Growth is complete, whether that's really your tradwife or an amassment of vines, leaves, and blood in the shape of your tradwife; ignoring their desperate pleas that "I'm me! No! No!" as you burn them alive, realizing too late you picked wrong; and the exploitative corporate nature of commercial farming in 2024. All seen through a deeply colonial lens, of course

When I made this post I did not expect it to be an effective test of which Tumblr users actually read a post fully before reblogging, and yet

PACING IS ABOUT LOAD BEARING WALLS.

*staples violently to my own forehead*

This is such good advice.

All I will add is: WRITE THOSE BREAKFAST SCENES if you want to, they can be absolutely critical in getting a handle on your characters. Or even on the setting. Write them all to fuck. Go hogwild.

Then cut them. They're for you, and for the characters. Not the readers.

Lo these many years ago, in an elevator at some convention or other, Larry Niven gave me some of the best writing advice ever:

"You can always burn it."

Go ahead and write that stuff. The breakfasts, the staring-into-empty-space scenes, whatever. Then pull them out of your work if they serve too little useful purpose. If you feel the need, shove such material into a separate folder to examine for possible usefulness later.

Even if you don't put it where other people can see it, no writing is ever wasted. Every sentence will teach you something. But if a passage or sequence doesn't help illuminate character, build the world, or advance the plot, get it the hell out of your narrative.

Your readers' time is precious. Do them the courtesy of not wasting it.

friends, this is what Kill Your Darlings actually means

leitmotifs never get old to me like holy shit dude there’s this melody that corresponds to this one guy and if you hear the melody it means the guy is there. holy shit. and sometimes it refers to ideas too not just guys. has anyone heard about this

Sometimes something fucked up happens to the guy and their melody gets fucked up too. Sometimes the thing that fucked them up also has its own melody and when the first melody gets fucked up the second melody gets mixed in

no fucking way dude. are you serious

OMG every time somebody brings this up (or even when they don't) I have to mention my favorite, and now that I have a Tumblr I can inflict it on many people simultaneously!! :D

So. Particularly bookish Tolkien fans will have read The Silmarillion, which depicts the creation and early history of Middle-Earth. Bear with me here: this actually does relate to leitmotifs. See, it begins with the Beginning, when the angels and archangels (of whom Gandalf is one but that's a whole other story), under the direction of God, literally sing the world into being in harmonious delight and joy.

But there's This One Jerk who doesn't want to participate in the harmony. He wants to run the whole show. So he starts doing his own thing. And it's awful. Loud, brassy, repetitive.

God is a very good director. He adjusts the music to work the bad theme into the harmony and compensate for its dissonance.

This One Jerk no likey. Violence ensues.

He is, essentially, Middle-Earth Lucifer, and there's a lot about finally getting him the hell out of Middle-Earth so that life can go on, although damage has been done. Long story short, he is eventually evicted, but not before he attracts less powerful followers and imitators to his cause.

Including Sauron, the Dark Lord of Middle-Earth.

Howard Shore, who wrote the score for the 2000-2004 Lord of the Rings movies, was aware of all this before he started composing it. Whenever the forces of Sauron are onscreen, you can hear their leitmotif. Loud, brassy, repetitive. And then. Listen very carefully to the music that plays during Sauron's final fall, and only then.

I shouted for joy when I heard it in the theater, because I am that kind of nerd.

uh oh

NAP OF A STAR || MINISODE 3: TOMORROW CONCEPT TRAILER

happy april 13th !!

the miku expo 2024 shitshow is gonna be a real test of how much people have spent the past several years especially on tumblr/twitter/tiktok spaces anthropomorphizing and intensely attaching to the concept of miku as a character like she's a pokemon especially from all the "hatsune miku wrote harry potter/made minecraft/etc" shitposts that treat 'her' like something that inherently can't do anything wrong. already seeing people going "yeah but miku looks she's having fun she looks great on a screen it doesn't matter i just wanna see miku" hatsune miku is not a real person you are not going to hurt hatsune miku's feelings if you hold the company who owns this character responsible for breaking 10 years worth of concert quality precedent after charging you inflated concert prices with those very expectations in mind. some of you goons have fandom-worshiped yourselves into stockholm syndrome.

Love how much is illuminated by landlords making a meme which equates the idea of tenants rights w like being murdered by the fuckin red guards

I like "fix my ac" being included here right next to parasite when that is literally their job to keep their property in good repair. Maybe if they don't like being called a parasite they shouldn't act like doing the bare minimum of work required is an unconscionable imposition.

illustration of atalanta and the calydonian boar i did for the dames anthology

[ID: An illustration rendered in shades of blue and yellow. In the foreground, drawn almost entirely in blue, is a muscular woman with neck-length, wavy hair, wearing a Greek-style dress and a glowing crown of leaves in her hair. She has a fierce expression with faintly glowing pupils and holds a bow and arrow in her hands. Three apples float above her head. Close behind her, far more loosely rendered, is a massive golden boar with four tusks and wild eyes. End ID.]

oh shit - i was time travelling and accidentally killed an ancient italian. doesn’t matter tho everyone was killing each other, when in Reme do as the Remans

*booktok voice* Do you want to read a gay story about two guys who speedrun enemies to lovers, go against their designed nature by being together, who become unstoppable fighting side by side to much dismay of the gods who created them? Do you want to see one of them eaten alive by the grief for his lover when he dies from a godsent sickness? A book about someone fighting so hard for a chance at eternal life that he doesn't notice he is throwing away the precious time he has got, filling it with agony? Well, in the  2100 BCE poem of Gilgamesh-

platonic dialogues are just like.

socrates: massive chunk of text

the other guy: everything you say is beautiful and true.

#people calling him annoying as if we weren't on the annoying people website do you not recognize your ancestor (via @cosmicallysad)

you are the only one who understands.

Got to see Hadestown for the first time ever today (and it was amazing oh my god I had no idea what I was missing) and I'd just like to give a shout out to the poor soul in the audience who had clearly never heard the myth of Orpheus before, because when Orpheus turned around at the end the audience was dead silent except for this one very audible gasp of "no!" from somewhere in the crowd. And after Euridyce was gone and Orpheus dropped to his knees in grief, all anybody --cast, audience, the uncaring gods, etc -- could hear was muffled weeping from the same person