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throesofincreasingwonder · 3 months

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"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

#original post #text post #500 #1k #2k #btw i know my definition of death of the author is loosey goosey here #it wasn't the main point so i went informal with it! as ppl in the tags have pointed out it isn't exact #and i do recommend reading the wikipedia article or similar (possibly even the essay itself if you're narsty) if you want to learn more!#wasn't expecting this to take off so my apologies to my barthes-heads out there #love you mwah #5k #10k #15k #20k

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ambrosiagourmet · 1 month

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I've seen pieces from this extra comic before, but never read the full thing until today. And holy shit does it hammer home just how much the story is about class.

Multiple times, when food comes up in this comic, it’s also in context of money:

I've seen this last panel on the right brought up before in context of like, dungeon meshi's relationship with fat and eating, but in the full context of the comic it really hits how much adventuring directly consumes bodies for money.

As much as this has been part of the story the whole time, showcased as early chapters 19 and 20...

It never fully hit me before how often adventuring comes down to having no other way to make money but to throw yourself into death repeatedly. To be used, whether it’s by individual selfish people (like the resurrection group that is happy to try and get Kabru's group to kill each other to get extra gold from them in chapter 32), or by the greater cog of the Dungeon Economy in general.

Which, to be clear, is all too often how things work in the real world, too. So many jobs burn through the health and lives of workers. Dungeon Meshi just makes it literal in a new way: by making the healing and resurrection, a core part to the adventuring loop, directly use fat, muscle, and energy from the body being healed.

Imagine Amazon, but if you got injured at work, they could literally burn up some of your body to get you back to working sooner. And that was seen as an advantage of the job.

And then you have Laios, thinking about eating monsters:

Not just because he likes monsters a lot. But because it would help. He says something similar in the actual manga too, during the chapter discussing his dream with the Winged Lion

Laios wants to be able to make a home for Falin. He wants to give her a place where she never has to eat alone. And when he gets a party, he wants to give them a way to eat well. And when he runs a country, well…

He wants to ensure that everyone has enough to eat.

Food is political. Food ties into class, and money. What is deemed "proper" to eat, what is a luxury, what is crass… so much of it comes down to money.

Being judged for eating what's available, when what is “proper” isn't affordable, is already a thing that happens. People forced into work that consumes their energy is already a thing that happens.

Dungeon Meshi has a lot of fantastical elements, but boy is its examination of food and class very real.

#dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon #laios touden #dungeon meshi spoilers #the full thing is up on mangadex and I v much recommend giving it a read #dunmeshi analysis

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great-and-small · 1 year

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Was looking for a book today when I saw these various animal books all on the same shelf and noticed their titles made a nice little impromptu poem about veterinary medicine

#for the record I haven’t read any of these so I can’t recommend them #but the titles are fun #poetry #books #vetblr

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you-were-meteowrong · 5 days

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reblog for bigger sample size

#i dont understand bookmarking everything to keep track of progress #like...#i just subscribe and read it IMMEDIATELY when i get an update email #i bookmark fics i'd personally recommend #i like looking at what my readers bookmarked #or what a fave writer bookmarked #gives me more stuff to read!#my thoughts #text #polls #my polls #ao3 #ao3 writer #fanfic #fic #writing

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ghelgheli · 1 month

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Often when trans women ask me when I'm performing next, and I tell them that it's a queer/trans event, they will tell me that they'd rather not go because they do not feel comfortable or safe in those spaces, that they have been dismissed or belittled at such events before. Even trans women who are dyke- or bisexual- identified often don't feel welcome or relevant in queer/trans spaces. And whenever a trans woman or ally points out aspects about the queer/ trans community that contribute to these feelings of irrelevancy and disrespect—such as the way our community coddles those who support trans-woman-exclusionist events or who make trans-misogynistic comments—we are described as being "divisive." This use of the word "divisive" is particularly telling, as it implies that "queer/trans" represents a uniform movement or community—a "oneness"—rather than an alliance where all voices are respected.

Julia Serano, Whipping Girl. Published 2007.

#reading #just finished it and this from the final chapter was my fav moment and one of the few times i was nodding along #the book is solid in certain places #even incisive at times #but it is so theoretically confused and downright wrong in some of its foundatioms #that i CANNOT recommend it as an introduction to transmisogyny and i can only SUGGEST it as a v critical read #may say more later #whipping girl #transmisogyny

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everycorner · 3 months

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How To Have Cybersex On The Internet (1996)

archive.org/details/howtohavecybersex

archived by Carta Monir

#this film is adorable #recommend reading the description posted with it #'Frequently one woman is using the keyboard and the other woman is using the mouse.'

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starberry-skies · 2 years

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i post for PACEY PUFFERFISH AND PACEY PUFFERFISH ONLY BAYBEEEE

i also post for for alexis anglerfish, delano dorado fish, gracie grouper fish, and lois lionfish.

y'all take care of urselves, stay weird and stay kind, goodnight everypony.

#edit: oh and also by reblogging this you agree that mspec veldians/lesbians are real and valid :^)#oh btw loves i would recommend Answer in Progress' video 'why you stopped reading' if you haven't already seen it !#in case u did actually want to start reading again yk?#oh btw prns are he/it. i'd appreciate u using that instead of theythem but like. idc #chirping #..... long sigh....#famous era #100 #edited this on aug 14th 2023- removed tags as well

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ale-arro · 7 months

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been going a little bit insane about this sentence from Ace by Angela Chen for the past week

#replace this with any other type of significant relationship too #also! this book actually rules btw i really recommend it #i didnt read it when it first cane out bc i was like. well i am already pretty familiar with asexuality and not rly interested in 101 stuff #but it turns out it doesnt feel 101-y at all its a super awesome piece of queer theory and also chen has Good opinions #and not weird watered down ones that i am sometimes wary of in aspec communities (frankly especially ace ones)#i think maybe if more people approached asexuality the way chen does (including and maybe even especially ace people)#i would be more inclined to still ID as ace #but anyways!#aro #aromantic #<- tag selections that reflect how i personally engage with this quote #also #described in alt text #also also #j tag #:/#aro media

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fulgurbugs · 4 months

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Guess who caught up in the manga

#everything went so wrong so fast in the manga. recommend reading if you like pain #fanart #myart #doodle time 😎#jjk #jujutusu kaisen #jjk manga spoilers #chosoyuki #yuki tsukumo #choso kamo #jjk choso #choso brain: weird ✅ offputting ✅ baby ❌ girl ❌. but who else could she possibly be referring to #yuki my beloved you were too good for gege he did you too dirty

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genderkoolaid · 1 year

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Tranny. Many people don’t know the history of the word, they assume it was an assigned hate term or slur along the lines of the “n” word. That’s not how it happened. Tranny was invented by us in Sydney, Australia in the 1970s where drag was a big deal, and still the best drag shows ever are in Sydney, Australia – they’re amazing. So a lot of trans-identified women who were assigned male at birth did drag, that’s how you made your living. And so they were transsexuals, transvestites, drag queens, and they were all doing drag to make money. They all bickered amongst each other who is better than who, “Well the drag queens are better,” “No, the transsexuals are better.” “You are all freaks, we’re better.” And on and on and on. But they worked together and they were family together, so they came up with a word that would say family and that was tranny. In Australia they do the diminutive, that’s how they come up with words. So tranny. I learned the word in the mid-1980s, late 1980s from my drag mom in San Francisco, Doris Fish, who was the city’s preeminent drag queen and she’d come from Sydney. And she schooled me in this word tranny, she said, “This way it means we’re family, darling.” “Thank you mama.” [...] So we used it and we were trannies together. And F to M was just beginning to start, the trans men were just beginning to become visible, Lou Sullivan was a neighbor of mine around the corner, and he was the first big out trans man, wrote his book. So trans men and cross dressers . . . cross dressers were also family. Transsexuals, we were all trannies and that felt good. That got into the sex industry and became a genre – there was tranny porn, there were tranny sex workers – chicks with dicks, she-males. [...] And, my only guess is that people who . . . because the only way they would have found out about the word is if they were watching tranny porn or having been with a tranny sex worker and then hated themselves so much that they turned it into a curse word. So it’s not really technically correct to say we’re reclaiming a word – it was always ours. So, many people mistake the word for the hatred behind the word and, in my generation, and I’m sure in future generations of trans people, tranny is going to be a radicalized, sexualized identity of trans in the same way that faggot is a prideful identity in the gay male community – not all gay men are faggots, but those who are are proudly fags and those who are dykes are proudly dykes within the lesbian community, trannies are proudly tranny within the transgender community. Does that mean we can’t call ourselves that because some trans woman does not want to be called a tranny? No. I’m going to keep calling myself a tranny. To the trans woman who gets called tranny, I’m sorry – as soon as . . . you’ve got to look at why you’re getting called tranny and if you don’t pass, you’re going to be read as a transgender person and then you fall back on the cultural view of trans folk which is freak, disgusting, not worth living, we can hurt you. It has nothing to do with the word, it has everything to do with the cultural attitude. So the word has stirred up a shit storm, but it’s not the word.

— Kate Bornstein on the word "tranny" in this oral history from the Digital Transgender Archive

#m.#the whole interview is very interesting i recommend watching/listening/reading

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iphigeniacomplex · 5 months

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it’s very easy to tell the good satires and pastiches from the bad ones because the bad ones are too afraid to live within the form. like if you are doing work with fairy tales and you are refusing to look closer at the underlying logic and unspoken rules of what can seem at first to be a senseless form, you are not going to create meaningful work. to borrow a turn of phrase originally used by maria tatar, if you refuse to enter “the house of fairy tale” as anything more than a gawking tourist, you will miss the particular order to the way the table is set, the rooms that are locked vs the rooms that are simply difficult to enter, the set of the floorboards and the position of the furniture. whatever you build will then be a gilded imitation of how you believe the house of fairy tale ought to look, the table set according to your educated specifications and every door open. there can be no interrogation of themes from a writer who views the form as beneath them!

#it speaks!#sondheim understood this with into the woods; the deconstruction of narrative itself is able to happen because we are able to believe in ->#<- the fairy tale logic he employs prior to this.#its a kids book but adam gidwitz understood this with a tale dark and grimm!!#cant speak for the rest of the series but that first book uses the absurdity of fairy tale logic to speak about the absurdity of ->#<- adulthood and the pedagogy present in many fairy tales to discuss the ways parents hurt their children.#rule of threes is important but theres so much on my list ive yet to read; always welcome recommendations.#fairy tales #into the woods #<- this comes from musings on how successfully i feel that musical functions so it gets the tag

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fangtastic-vampyra · 8 months

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buying books & reading books..two different hobbies.