omnivorousdilettante

[omnivorousdilettante]

Rewatching Treasure Planet (great movie, watch it) made realize something about the way that stories convey information to their audiences. There's been a lot of discussion on the overuse of plot twists and how many stories prioritise surprising their audience over telling decent stories. However, if you instead reveal the "twist" to the audience before it becomes known to the characters, you can build tension and stakes. Treasure Planet comes right out and tells you that Long John Silver is the main villain almost immediately after his introduction (And even before he's introduced we're warned about a cyborg, so you'd have to be pretty dense to not put 2 and 2 together and realize he's a bad guy). So when the audience watches him and Jim bond and grow closer, it builds tension for when Jim finds out and it highlights the tragedy of their friendship, because we all know it's not going to end well. Then, after the truth is revealed, stakes are created because we want the friendship between Jim and Silver to be repaired, because we know it was real, but we don't know if can be after what Silver's done. And all of this would have been lost if Silver's true nature had been a cheap plot twist. The tragedy would be completely overshadowed by the surprise and betrayal, and any investment in their relationship would have been built on the false impression that Silver was a good guy.

Another good example of this is Titanic. Even if you were somehow ignorant of the ship's sinking, the film makes sure you know that it sank with its framing device of Old Rose telling her story to people salvaging the Titanic's wreak. And Titanic's plot structure could only possibly work if you know the ship is going to sink. I'm not just talking about building tension, tragedy, and stakes for the characters like with the above example, I mean that if you didn't know that the Titanic was going down walking into the film, the abrupt shift from romance to suspense-disaster would be an increadibly tough pill to swallow. But it works because we expect it. You don't walk into a film called Titanic without expecting the damn boat to sink.

However, the sad thing about both of these examples, is that despite all the benefits that came from telling the audience these things ahead of time, I think the main reason the creators didn't make them plot twists was because they couldn't have. Treasure Island is the single most influential piece of pirate media out there, and you'd have to have been living under a rock for over a century to not know the Titanic sank. So, the writers had to work around the fact that these important turning points in the narratives were common knowledge, and they wound creating incredible stories as a consequence.

I want to see more of this style of writing in stories where the writers aren't forced to do it. We've clearly seen that you can tell some really damn good stories by giving information to the audience before the characters learn it, and I just wish more works would do that instead of trying to surprise people with shocking twists.

[omnivorousdilettante]

[omnivorousdilettante]

[omnivorousdilettante]

🩺

[omnivorousdilettante]

[omnivorousdilettante]

I went on an adventure today to return a pillow to IKEA with my coworker Astrid.

We were having a nice day and got stuck in traffic coming home. On the way her phone rang and she was driving so she declined the call with a sigh. “I feel so bad for him,” she said.

“You know that number?”

She did. It turns out her phone number had previously belonged to a woman named Serena. The man calling was her dad. He had Alzheimer’s and didn’t remember his daughter was dead, so he just called the number he knew was hers.

I was stricken to hear this. “Do you talk to him?”

“Yeah. Sometimes he thinks I’m her and we talk. I have a notebook with facts I’ve learned about her so I can connect with him better. Sometimes he knows I’m not her and I say I’m her friend.”

I struggled with the beauty and humanity of this for a moment. “What’s his name?”

“I don’t know; I just call him Dad.”

We sat in silence and I was overwhelmed with feelings. That she was so kind and thoughtful about this random connection. A man who called and spoke to her with love for the daughter he missed.

"One time," she added, "he called me just after I had a difficult day with my mom. I knew Serena and her mom had a rocky relationship so I talked to him about my frustrations with my own mother and he gave the following advice: ‘Everyone fails sometimes, even parents; what's important is to communicate with our loved ones, even when it's difficult.’

“I have never forgotten that advice and it healed a portion of my heart."

[omnivorousdilettante]

If you ever wonder why authors get annoyed at certain kinds of reviews, particularly those about updating, just imagine your mother saying the same thing about your room.

“You updated!” = “You cleaned your room!”: Pleasantly surprised. This one’s okay.

“You finally updated” = “You finally cleaned your room” Wow, thanks a lot mom. See if I clean it again if you’re going to be so passive-aggressive about it.

“Please update.” = “Please clean your room.” I literally just did.

“When are you going to update?” = “When are you going to clean your room?” Oh my fucking god, mom, let it go.

And when you get it from a dozen different people, over and over and over again, it’s like your mother continuously nagging you about chores that either don’t need to be done or that you just did, like, an hour ago.

[omnivorousdilettante]

"Because I said so" straight up isn't as good an answer as you think it is.

[omnivorousdilettante]

In my experience as a third culture kid who travels a lot the best indicator that you as a non-x is appreciating x culture is if the locals actively invite you to participate in it with them

Yes, you are allowed to buy those handmade Inuit winter clothes if an Inuk is literally selling them to you. They would not be offering you a price point if they didnt want you to buy and wear them. And you might discover that theyre the best winter clothes youve ever worn because of COURSE they would be if theyve kept this culture warm in harsh winters for thousands of years.

Yes, you are allowed to join those Cambodians in that local holiday theyre celebrating during your visit if they literally invited you to it. They would not have invited you if they didnt want you to participate. And in the process you might learn a lot about a culture you never wouldve interacted with and you can all have a laugh together about your clumsy but genuine attempts at getting your footwork right in one of their traditional dances.

Yes, you are also allowed to ask if you can participate in something from the local culture you are visiting. Sometimes you will get "sorry, thats a closed practice" but in my experience most of the time you'll get "of course, let me show you how to do this!" And in my experience people tend to appreciate when others make an active effort in sharing their culture and wont stone you to death if youre clumsy about it while youre learning. I guarantee that the local children doing all of this for the first time too make the same mistakes you do and they can tell if youre being disrespectful or genuine.

So much "cultural appropriation" discourse really starts to sound like "you cant participate or visit any other cultures if youre from a Colonial Culture and have to stay in your little box and never relate to other people"

[omnivorousdilettante]

Codywan Week Day 5: Medieval AU

close up under the cut

[omnivorousdilettante]

The Matriarch Isn’t the Villain. She’s the Mirror

I often hear a discourse where Celine in K-pop Demon Hunters, Alma in Encanto and Ming in Turning Red are seen as vilains. They’re the ones who restricted the younger generation, hurt them, and are ultimately responsible for their pain, trauma and self-doubt. They’re framed as the real villains of the story. But I’d like to differ.

These are stories of intergenerational trauma. They are women who survived, repressed, and tried to protect their families the only way they knew how: through control, perfectionism, and emotional suppression.

And yet, when the next generation begins to reclaim joy, freedom, softness — they become the obstacle. Not because they’re bad people, but because they’re scarred. Their minds cling to survival strategies, unable to recognize that the environment has changed.

Alma is still stuck fleeing the colonizers.

Ming is still afraid of her true self.

Celine believes that fear and mistakes must be hidden.

It’s not about hating these characters. It’s about how unprocessed trauma twists love into control. How survival, unexamined, turns into rigidity. These women were never given space to process their own pain and they project it onto their daughters and granddaughters.

And here’s something we rarely say enough: intergenerational trauma can create toxic patterns but that doesn’t always mean there was abuse or conscious harm. Even when their love becomes suffocating or controlling, these women are not necessarily “abusive parents.” They are daughters of silence, fear, and sacrifice. And they were never taught another way. It’s important to make that distinction, especially in a world that often pushes a binary, punitive reading of family dynamics.

They’re the product of a generation that was told to endure. But endurance without healing becomes its own kind of violence.

What’s powerful in these stories is that they don’t end in vengeance. They end in confrontation and transformation. The confrontation is necessary: the younger generation refuses the silence. Refuses the shame. Refuses to carry a burden that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

The house is destroyed in Encanto.

Mei accepts her full self.

So does Rumi.

And in the best cases, this confrontation allows the elder to soften too. Alma opens up. Ming listens. And I’m hoping in the sequel, Celine will open too.

Maybe that’s also why these stories speak so deeply to POC audiences. These aren’t stories about cutting ties. They’re stories about how hard it is to transform them, to protect ancestral bonds while refusing to perpetuate inherited pain. In many racialized families, collectivity, loyalty, and intergenerational duty are sacred... even when they come at the cost of personal boundaries.

And sometimes, Western individualist frameworks read these tensions as dysfunction or villainy. But for us, they’re just the difficult truth of growing up and trying to do better.

These women aren’t villains. That would be too easy. They embody the fragile, necessary work of bringing change without breaking the thread. These stories are about refusing to inherit their pain without reflection. Because love, without accountability, is not enough.

These stories show us that each generation has something to learn from the next. And the new generation must also break free from the chains they inherited while preserving what is meaningfull.

But it’s not just their story.

One day, we’ll be the older generation.

And we’ll need to be humble enough to learn from the ones after us.

So don’t be a fool.

We may be Mei, Rumi, or Mirabel today.

But tomorrow, we could be Ming, Celine, or Alma.

And when that time comes, we’ll realize how hard it is to unlearn what once kept us safe.

So let’s have compassion for all these characters.

Because these stories show us not just how the cycle of generations works, but how it can make us better, stronger, and more connected... if we’re all willing to go through the change.

∘₊✧──────✧──────✧₊∘

If you’re curious, I’ve written more on K-pop Demon Hunters:

A post on the mental health themes woven through the songs — right here.

A breakdown of Celine-Rumi in comparaison to Gothel–Rapunzel dynamic — here.

An analysis about Rumi, Jinu, and the danger of sinking together — here.

Some book recs for each of the K-pop Demon Hunters characters — here.

[omnivorousdilettante]

I loved when “Drift Compatible” entered pop lexicon cause we were in DESPERATE need for a way to platonically express “one of us to the other is as a limb to a body; we are a left and right feet of a dancer; we do not need to speak because any one word inspires an exchange of unspoken words that conveys a full conversation in which a mutual conclusion is determined in an instant”. Huge win for the QPRs out here

[omnivorousdilettante]

[omnivorousdilettante]

Okay so there's these two brothers who are both into cosplay and decide it would be fun to do a cosplay together, going as characters who are also brothers. Having suggested a handful to each other, both agree on making a cosplay as Boromir and Faramir to attend an upcoming convention.

And at the con they happen to make aquaintance with another two-person team of cosplayers, who are also brothers in real life and had had the exact same idea, except that they had decided on cosplaying Thor and Loki respectively. And they make friends bonding over this. Like an hour later the one cosplaying Boromir and the one dressed as Loki notice that their brothers are both missing, and neither one is answering their phone or even reading messages. So they come to the conclusion that whatever they're busy with, they're probably together.

They do end up finding the missing brothers, who were indeed being busy together, with Faramir sucking Thor cosplayer's dick. So things kind of get awkward after that, and the two brother pairs agree to go their respective ways.

The con is a three-day event and on the morning of the second day, by 10 am Faramir is fucking gone again. He has somehow found another Thor cosplayer to suck off. When asked about it, he shrugs and says that it just happened. And as they say, once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, thrice is a pattern. And by the time his brother had found a fourth dude cosplaying Thor, the brother cosplaying Boromir is starting to get seriously pissed off.

He's not even mad about the dick-sucking. He knows his brother. He knows that he's got a type. He's not mad about his brother being into buff long-haired blond guys, or about him blowing through the entire goddamn convention like a fellatio tornado. It's the way that his brother keeps acting like this is some kind of a coincidence, like he just keeps stumbling upon random Thor cosplayers who just happened to be looking to get their dicks sucked. It's the dishonesty of it all that's pissing him off. So now, Boromir has to put his foot down, and he says:

"One does not simply 'walk into' more Thors."

[omnivorousdilettante]

so when straight people ask me why I say I’m “queer” or “gay” instead of sharing my actual identity as a panromantic demisexual non-binary sapphic queer I just tell them “ok look, when you’re talking to someone who isn’t local and they ask you where you’re from and you either say the name of the largest city nearby or ‘town name, suburb of large nearby city’ so they can get some geographical context of where you’re located right, bc they’re probably not going to know the name of the little town you actually live in.”

but if you’re talking to a local you can say the name of your actual town bc they have a greater chance of knowing where/what that is.

ok well when I’m talking to a straight person I start with queer bc chances are they aren’t as familiar with the context of all the little towns in that big queer city and need gps (gay positioning system) to find me.

if I’m talking to another queer person and I say I live in a suburb of gay city in a town called panromantic on the demisexual side of the tracks which is in the county of queer and I live off the intersection of non-binary and sapphic, they’d probably be able to find me with little to no problems, make sense?

[omnivorousdilettante]

Current writing advice I'm seeing on TikTok and Insta is telling authors to stop using em dashes in their work because, "AI uses em dashes so people will think you've used AI."

Y'know, the AI that was trained on the stolen work of real authors?

Anyway, I will not be doing that. What I will be doing, however, is adding a note at the start of all my books that no AI was used in the creation of my work because I, the author, did not go to university for four fucking years to study English literature and linguistics only to be told I can't use proper grammar because someone might think a robot wrote it.

Fucking, insane.

[omnivorousdilettante]