pjospoul - Tumblr blog

[pjospoul]

amazing

anime boston round two this weekend! say hi if youre there!!

[pjospoul]

WOOOOOOOO YEAH BABY APHORISMS!!!!!!!!!!! time 2 read

let it be known that i will only wade back into amy discourse if paid to do so

[pjospoul]

got jamie!

I MADE A "WHAT LAMB ARE YOU" QUIZ!!!!! uquiz.com/MCaDP4 :)

[pjospoul]

Wormbox could NOT stop drawing Uber and Leet

[pjospoul]

WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY

A friend once pointed out that the fundamental problem with me is that I just like to talk about characters being stinky. I need to be more of an "equal opportunity" smellifier. This is my resolution for 2024

[pjospoul]

Twig Liveblog for Arc 7

another banger arc. at first i was concerned that it was too "wormlike," that the brechwell beast was essentially just a retread of leviathan, not to mention the meetup with major villains where the use of children in evil schemes becomes a point of contention. in the end though i think it ends up being more idea-heavy and character focused, which is pleasant.

really the arc is about the love triangle between sy, mary, and lillian. let's discuss mary first: i thought the most powerful moment was when percy asked her whether her moral opposition was her own or the lambs', and sy notes that what he's really saying is that he didn't design her to have a conscience. that she does have a conscience i think is interesting; i think it's part of twig's radical atheism. morality, for the lambs, derives from bodily forces rather than a transcendent ego-consciousness or soul (quite a nietzschean idea 🧐). peering into the way mary (as well as sy ofc) speak to themselves internally really heightens this effect--they have no "free will" over the ways in which they see and understand situations. instinctively calculating the easiest way to kill everyone in a room is simply the way she was built, quite literally in her dna. i'm glad she got to exert some agency wrt percy, and that she has experienced at least some sort of closure, but that said, with percy gone, what is animating her? it's hard to see her getting with sy after the events of this arc (😭), and her fate with gordon seems up in the air, probably doomed, though i suppose they're all doomed anyway. she isn't exactly an academy loyalist, and yet she also has no strong reason to defect except to stay with the lambs (and i guess maybe to reunite with her bff catcher). without percy, mary seems lost. she'll have to become a new version of herself (perhaps with gordon and hubris' help?).

lillian, meanwhile, has become far more interesting to me than she was before. so much hinges on where her loyalties lie. when it comes up that she would be reluctant to defect because of her family--that hurt a little. i found myself thinking: can't spell liberal without lil 😂. it leads her to hypocrisy. she loves sy and yet wants to join the very institution controlling him, abusing him. yes, of course, sy is pretty awful to her, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions such as whether to join fray, i've gotta say i think sy is right to manipulate a little. they're probably pretty bad for each other despite being adorable.

the themes of bio-control continue to enthrall me. that scene where hayle tells lillian that he considered chemically castrating sy but that instead what he's gonna do is channel his lust into an easily controllable receptacle (lillian) hit like a fucking gut punch fr. for my gravity's rainbow enjoyers out there (@pjospoul) it's almost like a disney version of katje and slothrop, especially with the presence of an octopus experiment.

thank god there's a dog now. i hope they do join fray, and i think fray is right to disseminate academy materials among the masses, but that's mostly because i think the proles deserve an easy way to synthesize thc.

[pjospoul]

sometimes posting hot takes to wormblr just doesn't excite me the way it once did. the answer is probably that i just need to get more extreme. brian is a he/him lesbian. amy is neither jewish nor catholic but zoroastrian. taylor's journey is secretly an allegory for the dissolution of the soviet union. yeah barely getting a buzz anymore wtf...

[pjospoul]

it's okay

fighting off the urge to read twig like it's an evil thought my cia handler implanted in my head when i was at the dentist's office using a frightening "Drill Tool"

[pjospoul]

at this point i feel like it must be on purpose

I hate the concept of grab bag capes and they're lame af. it's just "and she has this, but also this, and this, and this and this". truly the "improv theatre group" of parahumans. It was cool when it was just Circus, but if you want them to have enhanced timing or hyperdurability or something I say you should just give it to them without in-universe explanation. You don't have to be like "oh they're also strong because uhhhhh glory girl was hiding in the walls like the cask of amontillado at the time of trigger", go away wildbow!!!!!

[pjospoul]

peri is actually already scary. both of the times we met up she randomly stopped talking in the middle of our conversation and started staring at me with such hateful intent that i was utterly taken aback by her baleful gaze. silence, positive and thorough, fell. i paused, wondering if i had inadvertently maligned her, if she was on the verge of executing some malevolent scheme against me, or if she were staring at some bit of food on my lip or something up my nostril. in the minutes that followed, everything but the present moment fell away: the balmy evening heat, the itch in my left nostril, the bystanders nattering that we were blocking their way. we just stared and stared and stared into each other's eyes. but this impasse could not last. the pressure of her overwhelming aura grew too great, and something brittle within me snapped. i turned away and conceded defeat, and in that moment, i saw the sadistic triumph gleaming, like embers of evil, in her eyes.

looking forward to the threematch when we meet up again

I feel like I get really aggressive and hostile when I'm energetic (rare) but I'm also 5'2 and built like the geico gecko so my threatening gestures are read as "jesterlike antics". yet another reason to become a man

[pjospoul]

idk if someone's done this post already (it seems so obvious!) but can we talk about how closely taylor's character arc mirrors the three metamorphoses proposed by the titular character in nietzsche's thus spoke zarathustra. (i'll use the kaufmann translation.)

"Of three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child."

taylor is first the camel, a beast of burden; in other words, she is skitter. she "makes friends with the deaf," the undersiders, who don't understand what she really wants. she compromises her virtues (do-gooding) in the name of what zarathustra might call "wretched contentment."

then, beginning with the discovery of dinah, taylor begins a terrible and arduous trek into a spiritual desert, where the second metamorphosis occurs, and taylor becomes a lion. "for ultimate victory [s]he wants to fight with the great dragon" -- literally! for zarathustra, the dragon represents all preexisting virtues, the notions of good and evil that have been developed for millenia. dragon, the ai, represents this very moral rigidity -- and by defeating her taylor completes her transformation into proud unyielding weaver, who will brook no opposition to her, uh, ethically unorthodox methodology. only this blond beast could kill aster.

finally, taylor must become the child to complete her task. "why must the preying lion still become a child? the child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred 'yes.' " she must learn to speak a googoogaga-ass language. (as nietzsche notes in the fifth book of the gay science, what is conventional language but a means of becoming part of the herd.) khepri creates her own values, propels the rest of humanity forward. khepri exists, truly, beyond good and evil. "the spirit now wills [her] own will, and [she] who had been lost to the world now conquers [her] own world." khepri was an arrow of longing who crashed mangled and defeated back to the earth.

thus, taylor fully emblematizes an ontology of becoming. she is a bridge to the overman, and zarathustra will bury her with his own hands.

[pjospoul]

a funny pun

AQUAMAN: (on the back of a huge white whale) call me fishmale

hee hee ho ho i’ve been laughing at this pun for the past three days

[pjospoul]

I’ve also written an Eidolon x Reader fic if anyone’s interested

shatterbird is a lesbian, i'm sorry, i don't make the rules. this is science. this is divine truth. for every person she kills she has sex with one woman.

[pjospoul]

Realizing that the frustration I get from having a really annoying Fandom and specific vocal voices in that Fandom flood an online space for that fandom and create an inaccurate impression of a work to newcomers hearing about it is the exact same frustration I get when a semi- obscure work I like gets a bad adaption and thats all people know it as.

Which is like a weirdly helpful realization because I'm mostly starting to move past the latter and that makes the former easier to ignore.

[pjospoul]

eidolon: the S-class threat is my penis

[pjospoul]

you missed out the most important advice: 'just write!'

Do you have any writing advice?

show don't tell. kill your darlings. drink ginseng. diversify your portfolio. read exclusively books published in the last five years. only write fanfiction. don't let henghost read your ofic.

[pjospoul]

I remember thinking what a slog it was to read many parts of Ward and Pale in a a way that reading Worm seldom was.

(I’m probably remembering wrongly but) I just remember feeling that the dialogue got worse. like people tended to just keep talking and talking beyond where they would naturally stop, and they would talk about their emotions and reactions like they were participants in a therapy roleplay session instead of an actual conversation

lowkey the best parts of worm are from before the leviathan arc where taylor's monologue occasionally lapses into wattpad-isms. @cpericardium maintains that taylor is comphet ace but i'm sorry there is simply no non-heterosexual explanation for these kinds of passages:

i do think that basically after leviathan/s9/etc. she is comphet ace, which just means her sexuality got traumatized out of her, which is pretty fucked up