mightbeamonster-blog

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girls night girls night

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Video game friendship mechanics are really funny when you think about it. Off the top of my head I can think of

You must take your friend to certain locations in order to get them to trust you

You must do one task for this person to let you steal from their house but that task is potentially quite deadly

Friendship is gained by handing people random objects until you find what they like

Friendship is gained by handing people bottles of liquor you found on the ground

Friendship is gained when you are near the person for a long time, no talking required

Friendship increases when you pick locks where they can see it

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all the new god portraits (so far) in hades 2 !!!

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leave your laundry on the floor for them

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imagine you're some guy and you're going through the woods one day and you stumble upon a house and the people who live there just give you free food and eventually let you inside and it's like nothing you've ever seen before and the people are so nice and loving towards you and then one day they decide to never let you leave again, steal your balls, and give you a stupid fucking hair cut

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ITS HAPPENJNG

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sorry I'm diseased in evil and peculiar ways right now

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Grabbing people by their shoulders and shaking them until they can prove to me they know what "twink" means

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Baldur's Gate 3

Due to popular demand I've made them available for a time on my Society6 shop

Thanks for the reblog it helps a lot ;)

Take care Web wanderers ✌

https://society6.com/gaxixx

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Amalia 🖤🤍

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olive in her favourite spot having a ponder

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far from prudish but just got blazed porn of someone's pussy spread out so hard and up close like it's a map of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth and I'm king and grand duke sigismund II augustus inspecting his lands to plot defense against the swedes

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hm

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I FINALLY FINISHED IT

…is Dark Souls even relevant anymore?

This is my personal farewell to a game series that has managed to captivate and move me like no other. Perhaps you will find a few of your own experiences reflected within it, too. If you’ve found this comic, I’m glad we could undertake a small part of this journey together. Enjoy!

(I would have liked to include so many more things but ajksdkflkanc I’m just glad it is done)

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I wanna take a second with this to delve into one of my obsessions and break down the origins of the idea of "seperating the art from the artist", and why I think people severely misuse it as a justification for their support of incredibly shitty people.

The earliest references to this idea of seperating art from artist (that I have encountered; if someone knows an earlier one please correct me!) come from an essay by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley titled The Intentional Fallacy. A work of formalist criticism, The Intentional Fallacy rails against the focus on authorial intent that dominated critical discussion of text in the mid 1900s, with Wimsatt and Beardsley stating right up front in the first paragraph that "We [argue] that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art." They certainly didn't beat around the bush. The essay goes on to detail their reasoning, but to be honest I don't see that as being all that important here (though the essay has some interesting ideas and I'll include a pdf of it that I got off the UPenn website here if you want to read it!); more interesting to me is the way that this opposition to authorial intent has been totally warped since.

What I think is really important to focus on here is their word "intention." By saying we should ignore intention, W&B aren't saying that it's okay for us to consume the output of garbage people, and if you asked them if that was what they meant then they probably would have looked at you like you had two heads because yeah. Instead, W&B mean that authorial intent is an inappropriate means with which to create arguments about a work of literature, because they saw works of art as self-contained devices that must work on their own merit, like (and these are the actual examples they give) Artifacts (which I take to mean machines) or Pudding.

While this might look like I'm disagreeing with Fanonical, or that this idea of disregarding intention runs contrary to Fanonical's point, I actually think it really doesn't. First, as time has gone on criticism has long since moved past its whole "obsession with objectivity" phase, and just because these two dudes said it like 60 years ago doesn't make it gospel truth. It's okay, we're allowed to have opinions again. Anyways, second, W&B's point is that we should ignore authorial intent for our purposes of criticism, NOT that we should ignore what's in the damn text itself. What we can extrapolate from that is if the text has antisemitic caricatures in it, then we can just stop right there and say that the text itself is antisemitic. We don't have to care if That Bitch intended transphobia in her descriptions of Skeeter, we can just say "this text is antisemitic/transphobic/racist/classicist" - which if anything further distances the origins of seperating the art from the artist from the way in which people use it now.

I don't know where I was going with this anymore. I guess what I'm trying to say is that from its very inception, even before Barthes and his Death of the Author thing, Seperating Art From Artist has NEVER been an excuse to be uncritical in our consumption of art; if anything, it was spawned from a desire for people to be more critical of the texts they were reading, or at least to be critical through a different lens.

For those interested in reading the W&B's essay themselves: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/WimsattBeardsley_Intentional.pdf

hey do you think you could expand a bit on separating the art from the artist? clearly you’ve done it with jk rowling but what are your thoughts on it as a general idea?

okay, but you’re not going to like the answer.

here’s the truth: you can’t separate the art from the artist. not entirely. HP Lovecraft was an incredibly talented, but much more incredibly racist man. It would nice to say you don’t agree with his views but you can enjoy his works without that leaking in but…. well, I’m afraid that would be misunderstanding his books entirely.

Consider, for a second, that Lovecraft’s works were horror stories about extradimensional alien monsters having mutant children with humans, they were about invasions from distant monsters, they were about the purity of quaint European towns being tainted. Consider how this may have all been inflicted by the fact that he just simply despised anybody who wasn’t white. Consider how is opinions on “mixing the races” might fight into this; consider why being unable to maintain the “purity” of white Europe was the scariest thing of all to him.

This extends to Rowling too.

I would love to say we can just acknowledge that she is an awful, racist, antisemitic, transphobic person and then say “but at least her books are good,” because, well, they are, aren’t they? I would say so, for sure. But to suggest that one can separate her from them is…. ridiculous.

Consider why an antisemitic woman wrote about a species of goblins who live among us, but who for the most part keep to themselvesand are maybe a little bit oppressed by the institution, but also hold all the cards, all the money, run the banks.

Consider why a racist woman would write about a species of slaves who loved being enslaved, who enjoyed working for no pay, and cleaning up after humans, with the only small caveat of that they didn’t want to be beaten. Imagine that only the most radical of their species wanted to be free, and he still spent the rest of his life working for no pay and helping out a little white boy and his friends wherever he could. Consider why the only person in the story who thought they should be free, that they should have rights, was treated as an overzealous joke, who was acting against the wishes of those slaves who really LOVE being enslaved. Consider that Rowling went on to say that she kind of considers that girl to be black, now.

Consider why JK Rowling, an open and proud transphobe, wrote Rita Skeeter as having a large square jaw, thick “manly” hands, and dressing incredibly gaudily with the most obvious fake nails and fake teeth and fake hair and fake everything. Consider why a woman who tweets about how trans women are “foxes pretending to be hens to get in the hen house” might write this Rita Skeeter to then illegally transform her body in order to spy on children.

Harry Potter is full of Rowling’s bigotry, start to finish. Not even tangentially, like, “oh the goblins are bad, Rita Skeeter is bad, the house elves are bad, but most of it’s good!” because the deeper you dig and the longer you think the more you realise the entire story is based on her prejudices.

Harry Potter pretends to be an aracial story about found family, but if that were true, why are Harry’s distant ancestors important to who he is today even in the seventh book? Why does Harry have to live with his cousin and aunt and uncle? Because magic inherently prefers blood ties. Whilst Rowling was writing a story that seemed to say, “your heritage is not that important and doesn’t make you better than others” she was still writing a story about a boy who got all of his money through his bloodline, who was protected by living with his bloodline, no matter how evil, who was uniquely able to stop Voldemort because his bloodline passed down the invisibility cloak for generations and generations. Any step Harry takes he is compared to his perfect parents who were exactly like him — he looks just like his father, but he has his mother’s eyes, you know! — consider WHY a woman who is racist might’ve written a story like this. A story that on its surface, condemns a blood caste, but still in every step it takes, validates the idea that blood is thicker than water, and your geneological origin is what makes you special.

You can enjoy Harry Pottwr, of course you can. There are fantastic parts. I love a small group of teenagers deciding to become anarchies rebels and train to fight against fascism in secret. I love the murder mystery plots, I love how the series tells kids that it’s a good thing to be brave, and a good thing to fight injustice, and a good thing to challenge the government. But I cannot separate it from its author because it is such a product of its author. All of the structures of the world, the way things work in the universe, and drenched in Rowling’s beliefs, her bigotries. Of course they are: she made them.

Again. This doesn’t mean you cannot enjoy it. But I think we are past the day where we can pretend that disavowing a bigoted author is enough, and that that somehow separates the text from its bigotry. I think we are past the day where we can pretend that Harry Potter isn’t a deeply, inherently bigoted piece of media. Even the bits we love. I think we are beyond the day where we can truthfully pretend to separate it from her, because she is present through all of it. We MUST recognise its flaws. We MUST admit that she is in every part of it.