littletoska

[littletoska]

Esquire: Beyond the Bar (2025) 1. "Induction"

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2026 booktok discourse: sad books are a cognitohazard (they make you sad)

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a court of thorns and roses. ballad of songbirds and snakes. bowl of macaroni and cheese

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"pathetic" is almost the hottest thing a man can be, second only to "in pain"

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It was impossible… to stop. Impossible. But I did. I must love you. 

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characters have to be a little bit awful in ways that you cant defend. its good for the ecosystem. your honor he did do that. He did in fact do that

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you know a joke that never EVER gets old is when a character says smth like “I will NOT go to [place] and that is FINAL” and then it cuts to them in that place I eat that shit up every single time

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Blood and Gold by Obsidianpen: a fanfic adaptation

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Do you really want to watch a historical Cdrama?

After spending too much time reading questionable takes on MDL and seeing an interesting discussion with @renewedmotionforjudgment and others analyzing how certain types of "girlboss" narratives are infiltrating historical Cdramas (and the way those narratives are pandering to a certain audience), a comment someone left on one of my fanfics came to mind.

In this particular fanfic that was based on a historical drama but with a canon divergence, the female protagonist was taken as a tongfang (a bed-warming maid) by the very high-status male protagonist, the enemy of her husband. Several not-so-great things happened in this particular story (nothing too gratuitous, if we're going by the standards of history) but a commenter left and subsequently deleted a long paragraph deriding how I was always "torturing" the female lead and that she needed to have some backbone and fight back, that she couldn't believe that she was calling the male lead "master" like she's a dog, and so forth. I was mystified at the time. How would a woman with a scrap of self preservation "fight back" against this man in the logic of a faux tenth-ish century story? Why wouldn't she address her master the way all of his other servants address him?

My question is, do these audiences (especially younger women and girls) really want to watch something historical, or do they want to watch pretty people in pretty costumes therapy-speak at each other and live out 21st century relationship dynamics? MDL commenters want to crucify male leads for having concubines and jinjiang novels increasingly have this obsession with "double-pure" dynamics even in stories with emperors who have harems or noble men who are well into their twenties who would have long since been given servant women to teach them "human affairs." When people don't give historical female characters a chance to navigate their societies in historical ways, audiences are robbed of a chance to discover how female strength and resilience is more than just girlbossing, even in the face of restrictions and cultural practices that seem inhumane to us now.

I hope audiences and writers can continue to let history exist in historical stories, or the days of being able to watch fascinating dramas that capture the dynamics of the past, warts and all, will be history.

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why does viva la vida by coldplay always go so hard. i hear those opening strings and instantly im a cynical and mournful king walking through his overthrown kingdom like oh shit I totally did used to rule the world!!! I used to roll the dice and feel the fear in my enemies’ eyes but now im literally sweeping the streets I used to own!!!! idk what it is about this song but for some reason i can’t explain

[littletoska]

Coroner's Diary 朝雪录 (2025) Dir. Li Hui Zhu, Deng Wei En – Ep. 1

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Coroner's Diary 朝雪录 (2025) Dir. Li Hui Zhu, Deng Wei En

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A Dream within a Dream [dir. Guo Hu]

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LIU YUNING as Nan Heng "Li Shiliu" A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM 书卷一梦 (2025) dir. Guo Hu .

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LIU YUNING as Nan Heng "Li Shiliu" A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM 书卷一梦 (2025) dir. Guo Hu . — I abandoned, you ?

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Plot armor! He won't die.

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM (2025)