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arafilez · 2 days

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੭୧ ⼂ MY MIND AND ME ﹗

ー☆ㅤㅤ [ kgv x reader ] ㅤ੭𓂃 ㅤangst comfort 𓏧 drabble ㅤㅤ warnings depression crying ㅤ﹢ㅤ0.6k wc ㅤ𓏧ㅤ req

You look outside your window and lean your head against it, letting the room's quietness consume you. Your eyes follow a group of kids on their bicycles laughing and playing around on the road on the spring morning. It is beautiful actually! The air smells nice with all the flowers, the breeze is cool and the birds are singing but none of that removes the emptiness within you.

The negligence to do anything at all, the knowledge that you will probably mess up even if you try well haunts inside your mind as if it has dug up a hole and peacefully rests there. You look over at the dirty pile of papers you wanted to arrange for your project last night and sigh.

What’s the point? You will probably fail it anyway! The room looks a mess, unlike your mind! Your mind is peaceful. Cool, calm and useless. It has established you are good for nothing, a house of cards which will break with the lightest gush of wind. Or is it working through the torture in its sails? You don’t know.

You would rather not solve anything with this irresponsible and useless self of yours. A creak of your door makes you look up in panic. Did your forgetful self not lock the door? Your eyes widen in fear, breaths shallowing and mind hazed. Something’s severely wrong and you are the cause of it.

Your breath quickens and becomes heavier as your eyes dart frantically across the room until your eyes lock with your roommate Gyuvin and his brown eyes that are filled with concern. “Gyu hey,” you mutter out as cheerfully as possible as Gyuvin’s eyes hold yours and a shudder rakes through your body.

He can’t. He won’t possibly know what is going on with you. Is anything going on with you?

“Are you okay?” he asks, crossing the room with quick strides and gently threading his fingers with yours as you nod. Yes, you are fine, you just feel worthless and that’s realistic. So basically you are fine.

Gyuvin’s eyes go over your features and the past few weeks come crashing back to him- the small amounts of dinner you had, your messy desk, your reluctance to attend classes and so many more issues he had missed. He knew something was wrong and his instinct suffered from the idea while his conscience told him he was overreacting. But today he knew!

He looks at you and whispers, “Hey we’re gonna be okay,” and you snort. You probably want to cry but what is the point? And what does he know? You might never be okay anymore. Your throat constricts and you choke a light sob as you feel Gyuvin’s arm circle around yours. You cannot break down; you have been building it up so well and must use it when needed.

But when Gyuvin puts his head over yours, his arms becoming tighter around your body, your eyes tear up at everything that has happened for so long and worsened over the past few weeks. A small tear runs down your eyes and his fingers hold your hand tighter.

Pressing a light kiss at the top of your head and making a mental note to book an appointment Gyuvin caresses your fingers. He knows he can’t fully help you but he will do whatever he can. Even if it means, holding you and never letting go.

Because you need someone and he will gladly be that someone any day of his life.

ー☆ㅤㅤ [ ara's notes ] ㅤ੭𓂃 ㅤtysm anon for requesting this, i did some cosulting with my dad's psychiatrist friend about depression and tried. so i am aware it isn't goodㅤ𓏧ㅤ libraryㅤ zb1 shelfㅤ navi

੭ 𝅄ㅤ ꒰ TAGLIST ꒱ ㅤ⏤ㅤ @slytherinshua @sxmmerberries ㅤ𓏧ㅤ fill this or comment or ask to be added

ㅤㅤ(ㅤㅤ© arafilez on tumblrㅤㅤ)

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natt-writes · 1 day

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~5 Writing tips that actually help~

(These tips are meant for fiction books, especially fantasy. so if you’re writing nonfiction a decent amount of these won’t apply to you. Sorry!)

Find your writing voice.

one of the biggest issues I find in things written by beginners is a lack of emotional connection with the narration. Sure the story can be great, but without personality, without looks into the characters minds, without little quips here and there, it really isn’t all that interesting. Something that really helped me to realize this was a book called the tragical tale of birdie bloom. It’s a kids book but it honestly has such a good narrator (and storyline tbh) that you can look past the little kiddy-ness. I recommend you check the book out if you’re looking for some inspiration. I will be making a post about how to develop your writing and character voices soon so if you want some extra help with that, stay tuned!

2. Get to know your characters.

I know that you all probably already know this, but characters are one of, if not the most important part of a book. Readers don’t want to read about a flat, boring character who just feels like a vessel for the horrifying amount of trauma you add to your story. They want to read about people that feel real, people with flaws and feelings and hobbies and backstories. When I wanted to develop my characters I started going through the drafts, the plot outlines, everything and seeing what the characters did, said, felt. Then I took their basic backstory and started lining things up. Like if a character decided to get into a fight with another character, I would see what had happened to them that might have caused this. Maybe they had been abused as a child and thought that any disagreement meant they had to fight for their life. Maybe this person reminded them of a former enemy. After you start to figure out what connects the characters to the big plot points, you can then start to develop subtle things. You could start writing something, realize this situation would have triggered a character, and then drop subtle hints towards them feeling uncomfortable. Go nuts with it, after all you can never over-analyze a character.

3. Describe things uniquely.

Descriptions are what help us to understand what’s going on in a scene. They can tell us about the tasty drink a character is enjoying, the slick dress that someone is wearing or the way a characters muscles tense when a certain someone enters the room. But sometimes descriptions a fall a bit flat and that can ruin the experience for the reader. Something I always try to remember is to try and come up with new words describe something, for example; “her eyes were a beautiful shade of brown.” Is a very basic and over used description, instead you could try; “her eyes sparkled as she sat across from me, gleaming a rich chocolate shade as the light from the candles reflected off of them”. This is a much stronger sentence as it gives both environment hits and a description of the eyes, all while staying away from overused terms. I often see this theme in stories written by beginners, things being described in a very straight forward manner. And of course this is ok once in a while, especially if this isn’t a very important topic, but it still sounds better when you branch away from that basic sentence structure. I always like to use descriptive sentences to push things forward. Here is another example; “she was wearing a fluffy green dress with lots of lace. She walked over to the door and opened it.” Vs “the lacy trim of her green dress dragged on the floor as she walked towards the door. She smiled wide as she held it open, inviting her guests into the building.” Making strong sentences is very important, so please toy around with different words, structures, etc, until the sentence fits the type of book you’re trying to write.

4. Make trauma realistic.

Yes, even if you’re writing a fantasy book, characters experiences have to be realistic. Something that always gets on my nerves is when writers come up with a good idea for some trauma, so they just give to a character, even when it doesn’t suit them at all. if you are going to give a character trauma you need to explain it, set it up so it actually fits into their character arc, then have the character actually be affected by it. They can’t just randomly be like “I got shot by a dude.” And that’s it if there is no way that character could have gotten shot given their life experiences. Also if you want a character to be relatively unaffected after an extremely traumatic event you have to plan it out so that they have a specific and consistent trauma response that makes them not react shortly after an event like that. Characters are supposed to be like people, and no two people react to trauma the same way, so you do have some leeway if necessary, but people also don’t just stay the same after something horrible happens, they are affected by it and that has to be accurately portrayed. This does get easier the more you get to know the characters though, as soon you will know how they react to things and how to plan trauma that suits them.

5. Make a plot outline.

I cannot stress this enough, make a plot outline. Making a plot outline literally saved my book, and they are really easy to make! I recommend you download a spreadsheet app like XL spreadsheets or Apple numbers but you could even use google docs if you want. You want to put in all the chapters and then give each chapter at least six spots to write scenes. Add a spot for adding the main event of the chapter/a summery of what you have to write. This will help you to understand what you have to write for that chapter and how it fits into the next chapter. After that you start to fill all the scene boxes in with your plot information. Having a plot outline is great as it can be super vague and messy, but still hold all your ideas. It also helps to prevent unnecessary rewrites later, as you can just edit the plot outline before you start writing the first draft. You can even make a plot outline after you’ve started writing your book. That’s what I did and I promise, it still is very helpful. (Example of a plot outline below.)

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cbrownjc · 3 hours

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So Eric went and dropped a major spoiler because of course he did, lol!

I could tell from TCA 24 that this would probably happen with him at some point. Poor Assad was like, "Okay dear, stop talking now!" Real Devil's Minion vibe, lol!

Anyway, I have a thought about the spoiler which I'll put under a spoiler cut.

So, given the Justin Kirk rumor from a week or two ago -- that he's playing Raglan James -- one of the institutions is definitely the Talamasca.

But the second institution? I think it might actually be Those Who Must Be Kept. Because aside from Lestat's Court (which from what I know comes way later, basically in the final book), there are no other "major institutions" in the world of books except for the Talamasca. The only other thing I can think of that could be called an "institution" is Those Who Must Be Kept.

And TWMBK was name-dropped in the final episode of Season 1. So . . .

#Interview with the Vampire #amc interview with the vampire #interview with the vampire amc #amc iwtv #iwtv #iwtv cast #Eric Bogosian #Assad Zaman #Twitter #Video #iwtv Season 2 #iwtv Season 2 spoilers #iwtv Season 2 speculation

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elbdot · 4 hours

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Hey just wanted to say that I love your books and wanted to add a little story of what happened when I took "Die sieben Gartendrachen und ihre Freunde die Bienen" with me to work.

I work with kids and showed it to my group. My kids adored your art and several just took it and stared at the pictures for a while. I got lot of "these look just beautiful" from the girls in my group and even some of the boys were excited about the little dragons.

I later also showed it to a coworker, which send a picture of the book to her daughter. The daughter, she is currently training to be a graphic designer, instantly asked my coworker if she could rent it for a day or two. The next day my coworker told me that her daughter asked if she could just keep the book and is now searching for your other books and art. She also plans to draw some pictures centered around bees, because of your art. I hope am not annoying you with this, but I also kinda wanted to tell you this story.

Have a nice a day!

🥹 Thank you SO MUCH for sharing this with me, this actually made me cry (HAPPY TEARS OF COURSE) 🥹😭💖💕🥺

I am SO SORRY that my books have become so hard to find, stories like these make me both so happy to know that my books are loved and that they still manage to enchant, but also sad that they're basically all sold out at this point, at least until I have found a new publishing house 😭

I know of ONE last german online shop that has a few copies left of my intitial garden dragon guidebook, if you want me to send you the link, let me know, I'd love to help!! Otherwise you can probably only find them on sites like Ebay or second-hand book shops like "Medimops".

Stories like yours definitely help me remind myself just how much it's worth to keep up hope and get these books republished, it NEEDS to happen again 😤✊

#gardendragons #elbdot #relpy #mod #thank you so much for sharing this with me!!

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ignify-caligo · 2 years

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Geralt: Is it still visible? Where Cahir slapped me?

Jaskier: Your face looks like if someone spilled strawberry juice on it.

Angoulême: Your face has the same colour as a brick.

Milva: A palm reader could tell Cahir’s future by looking at your face.

Regis: The phrase “talk to teh hand cause the face ain’t listening” doesn’t work for you, because the hand is your face.

Geralt: …A simple “yes” would’ve sufficed.

#incorrect witcher quotes #witcher incorrect quotes #geralt of rivia #book jaskier #milva barring #emiel regis #cahir mawr dyffryn aep ceallach #angoulême #the hansa #the witcher books #the witcher saga #caligo's post #caligo incorrect quotes 2 #basically what happened in the books @ some point #or what I remember of them fighting after the hansa got established #correct me if I’m wrong tho lmao

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cinematicnomad · 8 months

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i was just talking about my favorite professor from undergrad who taught me queer lit?? and so i decided to email her to catch up and in the middle just dropped the bomb that i’ve since come out as bi and i spun it as a joke and was like “haha if i could go back in time i’d probably write a v different final essay for your class!!”

anyway i am literally shaking lol why did i do that 😂😂

#i loved her i definitely had a baby queer crush on her and just did NOT understand what was happening #she was this tiny butch lesbian who was like a head shorter than me and was just #so cool and i loved hanging out and talking with her #and once we had a v awkward late night convo at like??? 1:30AM when she emailed me asking me to stop by her office #and it was basically her fretting if i’d skipped out on her office hours one day bc of any perceived feelings on her part #which was not the case i skipped out on the hours bc i had pulled a procrastinator asshole move and not read the book yet #anyway i got v flustered bc i was trying to lie about having not read the book #and i think she got v flustered bc she was worried that i was some straight girl having a panic moment about her #(to this day i don’t know if she DID have feelings and that’s why she was worried?? or if she was just concerned i was misunderstanding)#(i can honestly say my mind had never gone there at that point)#(but i CAN say for years now I’ve been like ‘ok but??? DID SHE??’ mainly bc. again. i was OBSESSED with her )#kat is bi

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leatherbookmark · 8 months

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picked up my given books, started reading vol5 then took a break to flick through the other volumes and man it is with the HEAVIEST heart that i must announce i kinda hate the style change

#the eyes are larger and more stylized with thicker upper eyelash lines... the faces are more angular in the 'anime' style...#in general the expressions are more anime-stylized and less realistic and like. on one hand they're more clear but on the other i liked the #vagueness! the lines are also thicker and basically i suspect the same thing might have happened as with k-on the manga #as in the artist started out with their own style but after the anime came out they adjusted their style to mimic the anime more #and... maybe it's the same here? but while the k-on anime-but-in-the-manga style is cute i don't vibe with this new given style at all #especially compared to the one in the first half of the series... maybe i'll do a comparison later to show what i'm talking abt #another point is that it also makes kzntk's style more similar to other BL art styles... and i liked hers because it was unique :///#not bloody optimal :(#liveshrimping #skimmed the books some more and i have a new thing i don't like: hiiragi used to be Just A Guy who's a bit of a tsundere but nothing #too out of the ordinary but now being a shouty crybaby seems to be his main personality trait #nnnnngh not a fan of the animefication. i liked this series because it's Not That!! ugh #of course i'm going to read it properly and wait until the last volume but. hhhhhhhh

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house-in-the-backyard-trees · 8 months

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mental breakdown in the tags incoming scroll past for your own well being

#so like im just WORRIED #cause like what if ive fully just convinced myself i think he's attractive but I actually dont think he is and I'm just jerking him around #and actinf like i think hes cute cause hes the first guy im not even joking basically ever since the ripe old age of 9 except for cameron #idgaf about his privacy he can fuck off but anyway he is like the first guy other than tiny little awkward 9 year olds to show me any form #of attention. and what if im craving it so bad im just convincing myself that i like him? like am i doing that? cause never in my life have #i gotten like those fucking butterflies or whatever around guys cause ive never been around them much so ive always felt so awkward around #them and just ignored them. like i even have a hard time talking to my male coworkers and looking them in the eye. and i just make up these #scenarios where every single male coworker that ever showed me any form of attention is actually secretly going to fall in love with me and #its like FUCK is that just all I'm doing? pretending? on both ends? but then i have to tell myself that my anxiety is more often than not #full of shit. but like ive craved attention all my life and what if im juat latching on to the first guy that gives that to me? i don't #wanna be that asshole. im just scared. how does everyone just date people? i thought for a while i may be ace in some way #but im also just wondering if i repressed myself that fucking much from literally age 6 that it did that much damage to me? cause ive always #been weird about myself and my body and things like that and i vividly remember wearing a tank top at age 6 in school and being freaked out #the whole day that i would get dress coded. i need to unpack this in therapy hardcore. cause i was also sa-ed when i was younger but i can't #exactly remember how old i was.#but i just think ive always repressed myself and pushed all of that down to the point that i dont know what it feels like? cause i watch #movies and read books and listen to music qnd im like hmm thats never happened to me something must be Wrong With Me.#thanks for coming to my ted talk #im so fucking nauseous #is that butterflies lmao #🎸

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grandmofftarkinsuggestions · 1 year

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sometimes...... legends canon star wars..... is worse.

#sw #death star novel #i'm most of the way finished with it and dear g-d.#do ya'll seriously like this novel???????#i need to know what the actual ultimate end-all-be-all daala x tarkin book is bc it is not this one surely.#she's barely in it! she is just here to be his yes man and have a few cute moments with him and that's it.#she is meant to be the main investigator for the mysterious ship explosion that happened but then she retained #memory loss of the past six months after some brain trauma caused in a fight. and then she got shipped back off to the maw.#like any agency and importance she had as a character besides being an emotional base to tarkin (who is also barely in it)#was rendered utterly and totally useless. like she doesn't matter at all besides a few hey we totally care about giving tarkin an arc #/lying moments from the authors. like? they don't even actually utilize her as a tool to uplift tarkin's character arc. she's basically #just there for the investigation (which is now a fridged plot point? i'm assuming that's that on that for its importance to #the story bc she was the only one who knew anything about it and her memory got fucked) and they immediately threw that away #bc it wouldn't fit with anh plotwise and her injury was used for like. two or three scenes of tarkin being kinda nervous.#that's it. like the writers obviously don't care about tarkin and it's killing me bc he is objectively one of the most interesting #characters in the death star novel's mile-long cast of boring apolitical straight couples.#also they make tarkin and vader mildly irritated with each other. even when this book came out (mid 00s) vader and tarkin #were still canonically friends. like in anh. the first movie. the movie that the rest of either canon is based upon.#but whatever! i hate when sw authors ignore canon just bc they personally don't like tarkin like shut up!#get somebody who does like him to write him for g-d's sake.#and that's not even really touching on just how misogynistic this book's writing of every single female character is lmaooo #like daala is the best written woman in it imo and i just ranted about how they used her exclusively as a crux to tarkin's emotions.#insane that she didn't have a first name for over 20 years. that says it all right there.

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newvegascowboy · 1 year

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#not fallout #kal talks #ok to preface this is a POSI VENT #it just might get a little heavy #i tend to be a Little Personal on here and im going to be a lil more personal. im thinky thoughts #but man... its been a year since literally the lowest point in my life #like last march. i will say. was... really bad for me mentally. i wont go much deeper than that but maybe some of you remember.#im much much better now but i will say i was a little wary as this month and anniversary approached because i was afraid basically #(the actual anniversary passed last week and i didnt notice)#but ive managed to do soo much growing and healing from where i was last year like it is honestly astonishing #im definitely not the same person i was when i couldn't even honestly confront myself #in a way i think what happened last year was one of the best things to happen to me #it doesn't mean that nothing bad will ever happen in the future but it does mean that i survived that and i can survive whatever else #happens too #healing isnt linear i know that. like obviously im going to have setbacks and some days im incredibly whiny and bitchy #like October/November were suuuper hard on me mentally #but again - still here!#still alive and still putting laundry away and taking baths and reading books and doing art #And its almost SUMMER again!#and god i want to live this summer.#and its kind of funny how...when you think you want to die just saying thr words 'i want to live' feels like...idk. it feels like something #but i want to live #and i want to go hike at zion and i want to eat watermelon and i want to sit in the sun and paint red rocks #i wanted to die last year and it felt so real i could have but im still here and i want to live and do things while im here #that's all i guess #life's hard. its a bitch and then you die. but there are some pretty good parts to it too and every summer i remember why

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bitegore · 1 year

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You know the dream was good when you read the intro to a book and wake up going 'jesus christ what a fucked up book' about it

#red rambles #zombie disease outbreak happens and kid MC wakes up on a boat with zome other kid the author didnt want to put in. they get to shore and #have to hide from bad guys while staying safe from the zombie outbreak. which would work because they're on an only slightly habitated #island but everyone there is rich and covid has taught us they will not give up comfort for safety etc etc so they're not free of it #but they're in the wilderness and it seems like they have everything figured out #finally some people start seeing them so they get on their derelict little ship and sail out into the bay to wait #but there's a bad storm #and they come back to land only to then be basically flash cooked by ??im not sure what. the ground basically #others from the other part of the island come to see what the fuck happened and the sand has turned to glass and their corpses are like #burned into it #and that is the prologue. the tagline of it is 'friends will get you killed'. the book starts in earnest with kid a killing kid b and then #discovering that he cant stay on the island (which prologue!b argued against)#at that point i put the book down to take 1 small walk and then woke up

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sketchandsneeze · 2 years

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Hi.. it's been like.... 3 days... and uh... yeah Minecraft smp bullshit from a lil private bullshit me and friends are on.

#sketches #sketchandsneeze #artist on tumblr #my art #art #krita art #doodle #sketch #made with krita #artistontumblr #ref #Bind #Cashmire #It's mostly an smp in sense of what happens... or could happen it's usually not an actual smp in the normal way you think #we're basically giving around one mc world and it is on hard... so everytime we die we do a lil picking of what's still in our invo #then reset our spawn point and ya know sign the book we have all the time on us all lmao. and then hand it off to the next person who wants #to go ahead... we do have some lore shit and all and I'll be uploading what I write in the books on these character's toyhou.ses!#Lanternsmp

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pathsofoak · 2 years

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On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being hell yeah go for it, and 10 being I hope someone pushes you into the Maze right when the walls close), how much will I piss people off if I let people be mean to Chuck? XD

TW for implied child abuse in the tags (most of that won't be shown graphically in the story, it's just that I need a clear and obvious statement that WCKD is still and always will be cruel in this story)

#look I have this OC that is basically Janson but with a medical degree (unfortunately) he is called by last name Rutter because #he belongs in a gutter #and anyway the kids all get caught and isolated at some point and this man is the only living being Chuck sees #for two months because a nurse was nice-ish to him and Rutter couldn't have that 'bad influence on the research results'#he's bad with kids Thomas's age but even worse with Chuck like he's constantly berating him for being scared or hurt #which Chuck in turn will teach himself to hide and supress #because Rutter becomes nicer the more he 'acts like a grownup' aka just doesn't fight #but he IS angry and scared and grieving so he'll lash out at the others because its safe with them #there will be some stuff implied (physical abuse. happens to the others too except for Brenda and Newt)#Minho or Frypan won't ever lay a hand on him for having a bad mouth (or Gally but Chuck doesn't lash out to him too until later)#after a while he just goes full Minho in the TST book when Thomas had to hold him back #at every inconvenience because he has to supress everything even from the others (he thinks) until Gally Thomas and Newt guide him #in the right direction and he gets a little quieter (the ohmygod how much can a boy this small talk bit comes back in part five) and calmer #until they're saved and he openly and literally admits to being too scared to move alone so people know exactly what he needs

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iamthedukeofurl · 5 months

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Scott Pilgrim is, I think, the best example I can think of for establishing a setting's Nonsense Limit. The setting's Nonsense Limit isn't quite "How high-fantasy is this". It's mostly a question of presentation, to what degree does the audience feel that they know the rules the world operates by, such that they are primed to accept a random new element being introduced. A setting with a Nonsense Limit of 0 is, like, an everyday story. Something larger than life, but theoretically taking place in our world, like your standard spy thriller action movie has a limit of 1. Some sort of hidden world urban fantasy with wizards and stuff operating in secret has a nonsense limit around 3 or 4. A Superhero setting, presenting an alternate version of our world, is a 5 or 6. High fantasy comes in around a 7 or so, "Oh yeah, Wizards exist and they can do crazy stuff" is pretty commonly accepted. Scott Pilgrim comes in at a 10. If you read the Scott Pilgrim book, it starts off looking like a purely mundane slice of life. The first hint at the fantastical is Ramona appearing repeatedly in Scott's Dreams, and then later showing up in real life. When we finally get an explanation, it's this:

Apparently Subspace Highways are a thing? And they go through people's heads? And Ramona treats this like it's obscure, but not secret knowledge. Ramona doesn't think she's doing anything weird here. At this point, it's not clear if Scott is accepting Ramona's explanation or not, things kind of move on as mundane as ever until their Date, when Ramona takes Scott through subspace, and he doesn't act like his world was just blown open or anything, although I guess that could have been a metaphor. there's a couple other moments, but everything with Ramona could be a metaphor, or Scott not recognizing what's going on. Maybe Ramona is uniquely fantastical in this otherwise normal world. And then, this happens

Suddenly, a fantastical element (A shitty local indie band finishing their set with a song that knocks out most of the audience) is introduced unrelated to Ramona, and undeniably literal. We see the crowd knocked out by Crash and The Boys. but the story doesn't linger on the implications of that, the whole point of that sequence is to raise the Nonsense Level, such that you accept it when This happens

Matthew Patel comes flying down onto the stage, Scott, who until this point is presented as a terrible person and a loser, but otherwise is extremely ordinary, proceeds to flawlessly block and counter him before doing a 64-hit air juggle combo. Scott's friends treat this like Scott is showing off a mildly interesting party trick, like being really good at darts. The establish that Scott is the "Best Fighter in the Province", not only are street-fighter battles a thing, Scott is Very Good at it, but they're so unimportant that being the best fighter in the province doesn't make Scott NOT a loser. So when Matthew Patel shows off his magic powers and then explodes into a pile of coins, we've established "Oh, this is how silly the setting gets". It's not about establishing the RULES of the setting so much as it is about establishing a lack of rules. Scott's skill at street-fighter battles doesn't translate to any sort of social prestige. Ramona can access Subspace Highways and she uses it to do a basic delivery job. It doesn't make sense and it's clear that it's not supposed to. So later on, when Todd Ingram starts throwing around telekinesis, and the explanation we're given is "He's a Vegan" , you're already so primed by the mixture of weirdness and mundanity that rather than trying to incorporate this new knowledge into any sort of coherent setting ruleset, you just go "Ah, yeah, Vegans".

#Scott Pilgrim

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katakaluptastrophy · 4 months

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The thing about having read our way through two previous books full of necromancers and weird eldritch shenanigans is that the absolute horror of what happens to John as a person doesn't quite register.

John's own glib, matter of fact narration tells the story as an apotheosis. He was doing great. He'd have fixed everything if only people had listened.

But reading between the lines in the John chapters, you glimpse something rather different.

John basically spends the first half of the Jod chapters sitting in the dark with his creepy yellow eyes, not eating or sleeping, literally stroking his favourite corpses and coming out with chill and fun statements about how he can feel their skin when he's away from them and he's 'waking up'. Cool, cool.

Passing swiftly over the cow dome, Presidential Puppet Pals, and the suitcase nuke, day to day life in the cow dome must have been fun... You're all on the Interpol watchlist, the Vatican is asking a lot of questions, the police are outside and John - who hasn't slept in a week and doesn't eat anymore and is probably wearing some kind of weird novelty tshirt - comes wandering past while you're eating breakfast, followed by a dozen silent, dead-eyed corpses like some kind of mother hen. He makes a cow joke, and then zones out because he got distracted by listening to the bacteria in your gut.

And then some guys die accidentally and it turns out he can eat death energy. So now he's got creepy Twilight eyes, an entourage of corpses, a cape, some very dodgy eyeliner, and he's barely breaking a sweat as he instantly kills over 100 people, says it was an accident, and then, dead serious, tells his followers to drag dead UN peacekeepers inside to add to his 'skeleton army'.

By the end, he's not slept or eaten in weeks, is tweaking his own bodily processes on the fly, is puppeting the dead US president and possibly an army of over a hundred corpses, monitoring G- in Melbourne, carrying on at least two conference calls, and helping to build barricades out of chairs.

And I just keep thinking how weird it must have been for his friends. How sometimes he would have seemed like the man they'd known and loved for so long, and sometimes he would seem different. Did they ever find themselves mourning the man he was? Did they ever stand there as he tuned into something they couldn't fathom, staring at them with those yellow eyes, and feel some awful, uncanny valley terror? Did he ever feel like he was losing himself? At what point did the cow jokes stop feeling like oh, classic John and start to be a reminder that his desire for vengeance and the scope of his powers were outstripping his remaining...perspective?...restraint?...humanity?

#the locked tomb #tlt #tlt meta #john gaius #We think about eldritch Alecto lots #but I think John's whole 'I'm just a guy' routine sometimes obscures that in many respespects he's just as unsettling

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wifelinkmtg · 8 months

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TUMBLR POST EDITOR WON'T LET ME TITLE THIS POST ANYMORE SO I GUESS THIS IS THE TITLE NOW. WEBBED SITE INNIT

So let's say you grew up in the nineties and that The Lion King was an important movie to you. Let's say that the character of Scar - snarling, ambitious, condescending, effeminate Scar - stirred feelings in you which you had no words for as a child. And then let's say, many years later, you're talking about it with a college friend, and you say something like, "oh man, I think Scar was some sort of gay awakening for me," and she fixes you with this level stare and says, "Scar was a fascist. What's the matter with you?"

The immediate feeling is not unlike missing a step: hang on, what's happening, what did I miss? You knew there were goose-stepping hyenas in "Be Prepared," but you didn't think it mattered that much. He's the bad guy, after all, and the movie's just pointing it out. Your friend says it's more than that: the visuals of the song are directly referencing the Nuremberg rallies. They're practically an homage to Riefenstahl. This was your sexual awakening? Is this why you're so into peaked caps and leather, then? Subliminal nazi kink, perhaps?

And then one of your other friends cuts in. "Hold up," he says, "let's think about what Scar actually did in the movie. He organized a group of racialized outcasts and led them against a predatory monarchy. Why are you so keen to defend their hereditary rule? Scar's the good guy here." The conversation immediately descends into a verbal slap fight about who the real bad guy is, whether Scar's regime was actually responsible for the ecological devastation of the Pride Lands, whether the hyenas actually count as "racialized" because James Earl Jones voiced Mufasa after all. Your Catholic friend starts saying some strange and frankly concerning shit about Natural Law. Someone brings The Lion King 2 into it. You leave the conversation feeling a little bit lost and a little bit anxious. What were we even talking about?

INTRODUCING: THE DITCH

There is a way of reading texts which I'm afraid is pervasive, which has as its most classical expression the smug obsession with trivia and minutiae you find in a certain vein of comic book fan. "Who was the first Green Lantern? What was his weakness? Do you even know the Green Lantern Oath?" It eschews the subjective in favor of definitively knowable fact. You can't argue with this guy that, say, Alan Scott shouldn't really count as the first Green Lantern because his whole deal is so radically different from the Hal Jordan/John Stewart/Guy Gardner Corps-era Lanterns, because this guy will simply say "but he's called Green Lantern. Says so right on the cover. Checkmate." This approach to reading a text is fundamentally 1) emotionally detached (there's a reason the joke goes, oh you like X band? name three of their songs - and not, which of their songs means the most to you? which of them came into your life at exactly the right moment to tell you exactly what you needed to hear just then?) and 2) defensive. It's a stance that is designed not to lose arguments. It says so right on the cover. Checkmate.

And then you get the guys who are like "well obviously Bruce Wayne could do far more as a billionaire to solve societal problems by using his tremendous wealth to address systemic issues instead of dressing up as a bat and punching mental patients in the head," and these guys have half a point but they're basically in the same ditch butting heads with the "well, actually" guys, and can we not simply extricate ourselves from the ditch entirely?

So, okay, let's return to our initial example. Scar is portrayed using Nazi iconography - the goose-stepping, the monumentality, the Nuremberg Lichtdom. He is also flamboyant and effete. He unifies and leads a group of downtrodden exiles to overthrow an absolute monarch. He's also a self-serving despot on whose rule Heaven Itself turns its back. You can't reconcile these things from within the ditch - or if you can, the attempt is likely to be ad-hoc supposition and duct tape.

Instead, let's ask ourselves what perspective The Lion King is coming from. What does it say is true about the world? What are its precepts, its axioms?

There is a natural hierarchical order to the world. This is just and righteous and the way of things, and attempts to overthrow this order will be punished severely by the world itself.

Fascism is what happens when evil men attempt to usurp this natural order with the aid of a group or groups of people who refuse to accept their place in the order.

There exists an alternative to defending and adhering to one's place in the natural order - it consists only of selfish spineless apathy.

Manliness is an essential quality of a just ruler. Unmanliness renders a person unfit for rule, and often resentful and dangerous as well.

And isn't that interesting, laid out like that? It renders the entire argument about the movie irrelevant (except for whatever your Catholic friend was on about, since his understanding of the world seems to line up with the above precepts weirdly well.) It's meaningless to argue about whether Scar was a secret hero or a fascist, when the movie doesn't understand fascism and has a damn-near alien view of what good and evil are.

There's always gonna be someone who, having read this far, wants to reply, "so, what? The Lion King is a bad movie and the people who made it were homophobes and also American monarchists, somehow? And anyone who likes it is also some sort of gay-bashing crypto-authoritarian?" To which I have to reply, man, c'mon, get out of the ditch. You're no good to anyone in there. Take my hand. I'm going to pull on three. One... two...

SO PHYREXIA [PAUSE FOR APPLAUSE, GROANS]

We're talking about everyone's favorite ichor-drooling surgery monsters again because there was a bit in my ~*~seminal~*~ essay Transformation, Horror, Eros, Phyrexia which seemed to give a number of readers quite a bit of trouble: namely, the idea that while Phyrexia is textually fascist, their aesthetic is incompatible with real-world fascism, and further, that this aesthetic incompatibility in some way outweighs the ways in which they act like a fascist nation in terms of how we think of them. I'll take responsibility here: I don't think that point is at all clear or well-argued in that essay. What I was trying to articulate was that the text of Magic: the Gathering very much wants Phyrexia to be supremely evil and dangerous fascists, because that makes for effective antagonists, but in the process of constructing that, it's accidentally encoded a whole bunch of fascinating presuppositions that end up working at cross-purposes with its apparent aim. That's... not that much clearer, is it? Hmm. Why don't I just show you what I mean?

Atraxa, Grand Unifier (art by Marta Nael)

In "Beneath Eyes Unblinking," one of the March of the Machine stories by K. Arsenault Rivera, there's a fascinating and I think revealing passage in which Atraxa (big-deal Phyrexianized angel and Elesh Norn's lieutenant) has a run-in with an art museum in New Capenna. The first thing I want to talk about is that, in this passage, Atraxa has no understanding of the concept of "beauty". A great deal of space in such a rushed storyline is devoted to her trying to puzzle out what beauty means and interrogating the minds of her recently-compleated Capennan aesthetes to try and understand it. In the end, she is unable to conceive of beauty except as "wrongness," as anathema.

So my first question is, why doesn't Atraxa have any idea of beauty? This is nonsense, right? We could point to a previous story, "A Garden of Flesh," by Lora Gray, in which Elesh Norn explicitly thinks in terms of beauty, but that's a little bit ditchbound, isn't it? The better argument is to simply look at Phyrexian bodies, at the Phyrexian landscape, all of which looks the way it does on purpose, all of which has been shaped in accordance with the very real aesthetic preferences of Phyrexians. How you could look at the Fair Basilica and not understand that Phyrexians most definitely have an idea of beauty, even if you personally disagree with it, is baffling. This is a lot like the canonical assertion that Phyrexians lack souls, which is both contradicted elsewhere in canon and essentially meaningless, given Magic's unwillingness or inability to articulate what a soul is in its setting, and as with this, it seems the goal is simply to dehumanize Phyrexians, to render them alien, even at the cost of incoherence or internal contradiction.

Atraxa's progress through the museum is fascinating. It evokes the 1937 Nazi exhibit on "degenerate art" in Munich, but not at all cleanly. The first exhibit, which is of representational art, she angrily destroys for being too individualistic (a point of dissonance with the European fascist movements of the 20th century, which formed in direct antagonism to communism.) The second exhibit, filled with abstract paintings and sculptures, she destroys even more angrily for having no conceivable use (this is much more in line with the Nazi idea of "degenerate art", so well done there.) The third exhibit is filled with war trophies and reconstructions from a failed Phyrexian invasion of Capenna many years prior, which she is angriest of all with (and fair enough, I suppose.) But then, after she's done completely trashing the place, she spots a number of angel statues on the cathedral across the plaza, and she goes apeshit. In a fugue of white-hot rage, she pulverizes the angel heads, and here is where I have to ask my second question:

Why angels? If you are trying to invoke fascist attitudes toward art, big statues of angels are precisely the wrong thing for your fascist analogues to hate. Fascists love monumental, heroic representations of superhuman perfection. It's practically their whole aesthetic deal. I understand that we're foreshadowing the imminent defeat of Phyrexia at the hands of legions of angels and a multiversal proliferation of angel juice, but that just leads to the exact same question: why angels? To the best of my knowledge, the Phyrexian weakness to New Capennan angel juice is something invented for this storyline. They have, after all, been happily compleating angels since 1997. We could talk about the in-universe justification for why Halo specifically is so potent, but I don't remember what that justification is, and also don't care. Let's not jump back in the ditch, please. The point is, someone decided that this time, Phyrexia would be defeated by an angelic host, and what does that mean? What is the text trying to say? What are its precepts and axioms?

Let me ask you a question: how many physically disabled angels are there in Magic: the Gathering? How about transsexual angels? How many angels are there, on all of the cards that have ever been printed for Magic: the Gathering, that are even just a bit ugly? Do you get it yet? Or do you need me to spell it out for you?

SPELLING IT OUT FOR YOU

There is a kind of body which is bad. It is bad because it has been significantly altered from its natural state, and it is bad because it is repellent to our aesthetic sensibilities.

The bad kind of body is contagious. It spreads through contact. Sometimes people we love are infected, and then they become the bad kind of body too.

There is a kind of body which is good. It is good because it is pleasing to our aesthetic sensibilities, and it is good because it is unaltered from its (super)natural state.

A happy ending is when all the good bodies destroy or drive into hiding all of the bad bodies. A happy ending is when the bad bodies of the people we love are forcibly returned to being the good kind of body.

Do you get it now?

ENDNOTES

It's worth noting that the ditch is very similar to the white American Evangelical hermeneutics of "the Bible says it. I believe it. That settles it," the defensive chapter-and-verse-or-it-didn't-happen approach to reading a text, what Fred Clark of slacktivist calls "concordance-ism". I don't think that's accidental. We stand underneath centuries of people reading the Bible very poorly - how could that not affect how we read things today? We are participants in history whether we like it or not.

I sincerely hope I haven't come across as condescending in this essay. Close reading is legitimately difficult! They teach college courses on this stuff! And while it is frustrating to have my close readings interrogated by people who... aren't doing that, like. I do get it. I find myself back in the ditch all the time. This stuff is hard. It is also, sorry, crucial if you intend to say something about a text that's worth saying.

I also hope I've communicated clearly here. Magic story is sufficiently incoherent that trying to develop a thesis about it often feels like trying to nail jello to the wall. If anyone has questions, please ask them! And thank you for reading. Next time, we'll probably do the new Eldraine set.

#phyrexia #not defining the ditch except by implication #thanks to all the very smart vorthoi on the flavor text discord server for helping me work through my thoughts on fascism and phyrexia #this is technically the march of the machine review also #or as much of one as i care to do

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