saint-renatus - Tumblr blog

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and this

working hard on a chapter for a fic that usually gets a few comments/kudos each time and then getting none once you post feels exactly like this:

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i got a comment on my analysis of show!alucard and someone was like “my smile faded once i saw it was SHOW alucard but good analysis” and i just deleted it but honestly i think i should have replied with this:

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working hard on a chapter for a fic that usually gets a few comments/kudos each time and then getting none once you post feels exactly like this:

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this was under a fic which had a nsfw warning in bold at the top btw.

i never got commenting on someone’s fic just to complain. what am i supposed to say to “aww not *insert tag* :(“ or “saw the nsfw tag and frowned” like…okay? the fics they did this on were genuinely so mild too…i know it shouldn’t annoy me so bad but i swear i wish people weren’t so comfortable not even giving constructive feedback but just spewing their preferences at me as if i write for them specifically.

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i hate that on my fanfic tumblr people who follow me don’t ever interact with posts that i make that aren’t just fics, i hate that people reblog so little and don’t say anything (except beg for another part), i hate it so bad. i basically have 700 followers worth of people who just come to like a fic i post, ignore my bio and never say anything that isn’t just begging or trying to force requests on me even though i clearly state that i don’t take them. the ones who give me something to work with are usually not even followers, just people who saw my fic once and reblogged with a lovely comment, and i know i’m not the best fic writer out there but it’s super discouraging. i hate that i feel like i can’t write what i want to because it’ll get passed over until i write something they beg me for.

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i never got commenting on someone’s fic just to complain. what am i supposed to say to “aww not *insert tag* :(“ or “saw the nsfw tag and frowned” like…okay? the fics they did this on were genuinely so mild too…i know it shouldn’t annoy me so bad but i swear i wish people weren’t so comfortable not even giving constructive feedback but just spewing their preferences at me as if i write for them specifically.

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Weyes Blood  “And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow” 

Imagery by Neil Krug

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a lot of people seem to have trouble accepting that cynical embittered teenagers are literally right about the education system. in fact when people express that something is making them suffer suicidally it generally means there is something wrong. big news for people who desperately fucking hate kids

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three romanian authors to read with ur dracula daily

dracula is an orientalist text conceived at the height of british empire, grounded in distortions of a region that stoker never visited. sadly (and unsurprisingly) i found very few romanian authors who have been translated into english online, so here’s a meagre list of recs:

1. luminița cioabă

romanian roma author, famous in romania as the daughter of bulibasha (the king of the roma nation), she forged her own path as a writer of short stories in the oral roma tradition which portray in vivid detail the history of the roma people of romania 

the birch grove

queen of the night and stone flower 

meralda

from her book, the lost country 

2. marin sorescu

from humble rural romanian roots, he wrote under the oppressive ceausescu government. in a national ironic tradition he very famously said: "Just as I can’t give up smoking because I don’t smoke, I can’t give up writing because I have no talent.“ some of my favorite poems:

the sea shell (1983)

carbon paper (1980)

creation (1992)

3. paul celan

jewish poet from bucovina. i recommend this beautiful essay by ilya kaminsky, who like celan was forced to flee eastern europe due to antisemitism, deconstructing various translators’ attempts to adapt celan’s texts and experience of the holocaust. these are all poems from a 1971 poetry collection

all souls

leap-centuries 

language mesh and night

homecoming

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i literally don't know where to start

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Catherine Howard’s Cream Gown (Henry VIII and His Six Wives, 1972)

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Catherine Howard’s White Gown.

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well i absolutely know i made a hilarious typo in one of my fics and just realized when i was looking at the document so at least now no one can see it #silverlinings

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when you’re reading hotd fanfic and then they add “the boys all made fun of Aemond for not having a dragon but y/n would NEVER do that”

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I get that completely! mostly this was directed at people active in the otome isekai forums and other places to discuss, people who have read so many of these they know the drill and are still reading them. They understand that the overwhelming majority of these works are like what I described on some level because that is their purpose and they keep complaining anyway when that’s what they continue to get because the aim of these stories as a whole doesn’t change because of a few individual stories. Out of hundreds (thousands if you count novels) of oi, there are relatively few that go against the grain by their definition. There will always be stand outs and I understand hoping for new things but I think it’s a bit much to be consistently disappointed that a genre that relies on status quo so much doesn’t start churning out kill the villainess variants instead of continuing to fill the niche it was meant for. I understand this viewpoint especially with those who are relatively new to it, as in having only read a few oi, though. I don’t think it’s entirely unreasonable either, just a lil tedious.

Honestly, I don’t get how people can’t understand that otome isekai is literally for wish fulfillment and self inserting not for being “realistic”😭 rest under the cut bc I have so many opinions.

The criticisms are always like “why doesn’t the protagonist ever miss her family” “why don’t they struggle without the use of google”(and yes this is a serious critique I’ve seen made) this is supposed to be a fantasy of being reborn as a rich lady with hot guys all over her this is obviously not made to be realistic. That’s why kill the villainess does nothing for me (no shade if it’s a favorite of yours), it’s commentary/satire of the genre falls flat because the purpose of isekai is not to show the main character struggling and being depressed. The purpose is escapism. It critiques otome isekai on something it was never trying to be and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why these works exist in the first place. Kill the villainess feels like it was written by someone who didn’t bother trying to understand what they sought to critique and thought the people who read it were too dumb to understand that it wasn’t realistic. Commentary and subversion of tropes and media best work when they are made by people who actually like the original pieces of media because they’re the ones who are going to be aware of what is worthwhile critique of it. In making coherent criticism of a piece of media, you generally have to base them on what that work is going for, not whatever thing you wanted to see that contradicts the story and it was never written to be. When people were praising it like “finally! a realistic reaction to being isekai’d” to me, it sounded like when people on twitter go “What about a superman movie where superman has a realistic character arc and is corrupted and turned evil?” like do you even know what media you’re consuming right now? Do you know why people like it? What purpose it serves? What it’s trying to be? Kill the villainess is so ineffectual to me because it doesn't critique or satirize any actual issue of OI. I know it has the yandere male leads but so do hundreds of other novels and manhwa, trying to escape a psycho male character is the plot of so many other OI and KTV adds nothing to the topic. Sympathetic second female lead/heroine? Done already and arguably better. It hinges on a such flimsy premise and people act as if it's groundbreaking even though it misses the point because so did they.

I hate how women can’t have their wish fulfillment or badass power fantasies without someone whining because the female lead hasn’t tried to kill herself or been abused and it isn’t rEaLiStiC enough. Of course it isn’t, women get enough of watching female characters suffer on screen for the sake of realism maybe we just want to come home and read a silly story sometimes about a princess who falls in love with a knight and can heal people with magic or whatever. Men can get all the power fantasies they want in their media and have it go without any heavy criticism or great demand for realism but how dare women have nice stories where they’re not suffering constantly and yearning to get back to their shitty families/lives and can fall in love in a new fictional world more romantic than the real one. Watching people gush over miserable media simply for the fact that it is miserable and call it realistic just because the female lead is suffering and the male lead gets to do whatever, and use it to shit on the stories that women wrote in order to give some reprieve to what we already go through — the stories this genre is for — is so bleak.

Furthermore I hate the takes about how “everyone thinks these otome isekai worlds are better because magic but they’re actually suuuper lawless and dark” like no. People wanna live in these worlds because they are magical, fluffy, romantic settings where cliches can thrive, evil is always vanquished and the story is simple. It would be like saying “everyone wants to live in these beautiful disney movie kingdoms but they’re actually so dark, they’re based on medieval times so obviously even though you can see it’s only loosely based on those times, the world MUST be exactly like the dark ages. And look how they let evil sorceresses and flynn rider (convicted thief) roam around, clearly it’s a lawless land.” In most (not all) cases, it’s literally just a highly idealized setting for romance, defeating evil and living happily ever after.

It’s fine if self inserting or wish fulfillment isn’t your thing but to be blunt — find a new genre because otome isekai isn’t constantly referencing otome games for no reason. It’s self insert material. This genre wasn't and still really isn't for “realistic” tales and I don’t see the point in pretending that it is and complaining about the lack of it. That’s not to say I dislike realistic stories as a whole, just that they’re not really what otome isekai is for. I refuse to believe that people are just all around too oblivious to understand what these stories are for, I kinda just think these people make these complaints because most of the manga/manhwa is low hanging fruit and can be critiqued easily because they’re not challenging works. These people can say that they long for a more complex story with such and such subversions but those stories already exist and these people don’t seem to care to read or discuss them instead. And of course not, because those pieces of media are actually challenging and why put in the effort when you can pretend to be smart and enlightened by making pointless critiques of cliche stories? Why actually read complex media with subversions and topical commentary when you can make sure everyone knows you’re a super smart media critic by complaining about a story which never intended to be anything but silly wish fulfillment?

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Honestly, I don’t get how people can’t understand that otome isekai is literally for wish fulfillment and self inserting not for being “realistic”😭 rest under the cut bc I have so many opinions.

The criticisms are always like “why doesn’t the protagonist ever miss her family” “why don’t they struggle without the use of google”(and yes this is a serious critique I’ve seen made) this is supposed to be a fantasy of being reborn as a rich lady with hot guys all over her this is obviously not made to be realistic. That’s why kill the villainess does nothing for me (no shade if it’s a favorite of yours), it’s commentary/satire of the genre falls flat because the purpose of isekai is not to show the main character struggling and being depressed. The purpose is escapism. It critiques otome isekai on something it was never trying to be and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why these works exist in the first place. Kill the villainess feels like it was written by someone who didn’t bother trying to understand what they sought to critique and thought the people who read it were too dumb to understand that it wasn’t realistic. Commentary and subversion of tropes and media best work when they are made by people who actually like the original pieces of media because they’re the ones who are going to be aware of what is worthwhile critique of it. In making coherent criticism of a piece of media, you generally have to base them on what that work is going for, not whatever thing you wanted to see that contradicts the story and it was never written to be. When people were praising it like “finally! a realistic reaction to being isekai’d” to me, it sounded like when people on twitter go “What about a superman movie where superman has a realistic character arc and is corrupted and turned evil?” like do you even know what media you’re consuming right now? Do you know why people like it? What purpose it serves? What it’s trying to be? Kill the villainess is so ineffectual to me because it doesn't critique or satirize any actual issue of OI. I know it has the yandere male leads but so do hundreds of other novels and manhwa, trying to escape a psycho male character is the plot of so many other OI and KTV adds nothing to the topic. Sympathetic second female lead/heroine? Done already and arguably better. It hinges on a such flimsy premise and people act as if it's groundbreaking even though it misses the point because so did they.

I hate how women can’t have their wish fulfillment or badass power fantasies without someone whining because the female lead hasn’t tried to kill herself or been abused and it isn’t rEaLiStiC enough. Of course it isn’t, women get enough of watching female characters suffer on screen for the sake of realism maybe we just want to come home and read a silly story sometimes about a princess who falls in love with a knight and can heal people with magic or whatever. Men can get all the power fantasies they want in their media and have it go without any heavy criticism or great demand for realism but how dare women have nice stories where they’re not suffering constantly and yearning to get back to their shitty families/lives and can fall in love in a new fictional world more romantic than the real one. Watching people gush over miserable media simply for the fact that it is miserable and call it realistic just because the female lead is suffering and the male lead gets to do whatever, and use it to shit on the stories that women wrote in order to give some reprieve to what we already go through — the stories this genre is for — is so bleak.

Furthermore I hate the takes about how “everyone thinks these otome isekai worlds are better because magic but they’re actually suuuper lawless and dark” like no. People wanna live in these worlds because they are magical, fluffy, romantic settings where cliches can thrive, evil is always vanquished and the story is simple. It would be like saying “everyone wants to live in these beautiful disney movie kingdoms but they’re actually so dark, they’re based on medieval times so obviously even though you can see it’s only loosely based on those times, the world MUST be exactly like the dark ages. And look how they let evil sorceresses and flynn rider (convicted thief) roam around, clearly it’s a lawless land.” In most (not all) cases, it’s literally just a highly idealized setting for romance, defeating evil and living happily ever after.

It’s fine if self inserting or wish fulfillment isn’t your thing but to be blunt — find a new genre because otome isekai isn’t constantly referencing otome games for no reason. It’s self insert material. This genre wasn't and still really isn't for “realistic” tales and I don’t see the point in pretending that it is and complaining about the lack of it. That’s not to say I dislike realistic stories as a whole, just that they’re not really what otome isekai is for. I refuse to believe that people are just all around too oblivious to understand what these stories are for, I kinda just think these people make these complaints because most of the manga/manhwa is low hanging fruit and can be critiqued easily because they’re not challenging works. These people can say that they long for a more complex story with such and such subversions but those stories already exist and these people don’t seem to care to read or discuss them instead. And of course not, because those pieces of media are actually challenging and why put in the effort when you can pretend to be smart and enlightened by making pointless critiques of cliche stories? Why actually read complex media with subversions and topical commentary when you can make sure everyone knows you’re a super smart media critic by complaining about a story which never intended to be anything but silly wish fulfillment?

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desperately wish i was back in babylon as a beloved sorceress and had my excellent harem of male concubines by my side. cannot believe i am forced to merge in traffic on freeways instead