anactorya

[anactorya]

Pet Shop of Horrors is a manga that asks deep and thought-provoking questions like:

How do you reconcile loving and caring about somebody you think is guilty of horrible crimes?

How culpable are individual people for the crimes of humanity as a whole?

Can humanity learn to care about and protect the environment?

Is it possible to break an intergenerational cycle of vengeance?

What if the guy who ran the Gremlins pet store served cunt?

[anactorya]

there’s a certain type of Manly Man character who queer people can instantly sniff out as putting on a charade of masculinity that only the deeply repressed can perform but when you point this out to cishet people they’re like “whattt??? but he’s so manly!!! he likes cars and beer and has sex with women!!! how could he possibly be a f - uh, gay”

[anactorya]

Yeah

[anactorya]

like i'm sorry but we as a fandom have to stay firm on our anti-AI values. we cannot suddenly start giving AI a pass when it's something we "want to see" like destiel kisses. it's not suddenly fine. we're not going to start using AI to make fanfic scenes come to life or audio AI to make characters "say" stuff we want to hear. you have GOT to be firm on your anti-AI stance. if you start making exceptions then suddenly anything will fly. fandom is for real art and creations made by real people. no AI fanfics. no AI art. no AI rendered "bonus" scenes. no AI audio. none of it has a place here.

[anactorya]

⚠️cw// blood, gore⚠️

Berserkween Day 2: Corpse Bride ⚰️👰‍♂️

What's wrong Guts? He only wants to give you his heart 🥹🫀 Not to worry, it's only a Halloween costume, no hearts were ripped out in the making of this. Not that Griffguts hasn't ripped my heart out & taken ownership 😭

[anactorya]

Crazy how many people want characters in fiction to speak and act like they’ve had 20 hours of intensive therapy. Could NOT be me I want these bitches fucked up insane

[anactorya]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you ��� are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[anactorya]

La saga del ex novio tóxico!!!

[anactorya]

Aɴᴅ ʜᴇᴀᴠᴇɴ ᴋɴᴏᴡs I'ᴍ ᴘʀᴏɴᴇ ᴛᴏ ʟᴇᴀᴠᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴏɴʟʏ ɢᴏᴅ I sʜᴏᴜʟᴅ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ʟᴏᴠᴇᴅ,

Aɴᴅ ʏᴇᴛ ʏᴏᴜ'ʀᴇ ғᴀʀ ᴛᴏᴏ ʙᴇᴀᴜᴛɪғᴜʟ ᴛᴏ ʟᴇᴀᴠᴇ ᴍᴇ

[anactorya]

why dont you read/watch something that forces you to confront the fact that you are capable of feeling empathy for a person who has done deeply cruel or evil things. And maybe you’ll calm down

[anactorya]

personally i’m a fan of when a story is like. the love was there. unfortunately. this all could have actually gone a lot easier for everyone if the love hadn’t been there but here we are

[anactorya]

"you can't ship those characters they tried to kill each other!" sounds like someone can't appreciate the inherent eroticism of violence 🙄

[anactorya]

"romantic" "platonic" no whatever those two have going on is way more sinister than all that

[anactorya]

making a collection

[anactorya]

I think some people forget that some literature and some media is meant to be deeply uncomfortable and unsettling. It's meant to make you have a very visceral reaction to it. If you genuinely can't handle these stories then you are under no obligation to consume them but acting as if they have no purpose or as if people don't have a right to tell these stories, stories that often relate to the darkest or most disturbing parts of life, then you should do some introspection.

[anactorya]

some asshole: “Why do you even like that character?”

me: “Because they’re a great character.”

asshole: “But they’ve done so many shitty and problematic things, you can’t just excuse-”

me: “I said a GREAT CHARACTER not a GOOD PERSON you imaginationless wet napkin, this character is an asshole and a human disaster who deserves everything coming to them but they c a n s t i l l b e m y f a v o r i t e”