suits-of-woe - Tumblr blog

[suits-of-woe]

she took my empire of dirt in the divorce

[suits-of-woe]

oooo I hadn't even thought about the whole 'one house' thing at the end. The fucking layers in this stupid godawful play

IT'S SOOOOOOOO. i hate this play. why does it live in my head rent free.

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girl I just finished two gentleman of verona and I am Screaming Into The Void. Still haven't fully processed how fucked up Proteus and Valentine's relationship is like. The jealousy the repression the performative heterosexual desire as an outlet for some deeper feeling???? The desperately unsatisfying resolution? The last two words being perfect happiness? Help me.

for real. for REAL. i am unwell about them. there's a secret tragedy hidden in shakespeare's stupid goofy very misogynistic first comedy and i can prove it. i think about proteus' supposed changeability being a symptom of the fact that he will just fixate on ANY woman who is not valentine to try to distract himself from his real feelings. AND THE LAST LINES ARE JUST. INSANE.

That done, our day of marriage shall be yours; One feast, one house, one mutual happiness.

a lot of scholars talk about the fact that this ending note is, in technical terms, Super Fucking Gay because it fully sounds like they could be marrying each other and are then going to move in together? girl?? so even if you take the ending as happy it's so much.

but in the production that lives in MY head these lines are actually delivered really bitterly by valentine. because in the last scene there's a moment where valentine basically admits that proteus has always been the one he loves most intensely and proteus realizes that it WAS about valentine for him the whole time but then he realizes julia is there and retreats back into the performative heterosexuality of it all. and so the "one mutual happiness" is the thing they could have had if proteus hadn't been wildly evil, if proteus hadn't been terrified. it's the ending they can't reach anymore but have to pretend is real. and in MY head by the end of the play they both know it.

anyway. anyway. i am so normal about this play.

[suits-of-woe]

sketches for palestine

Donate to Palestine & I will draw you a pencil portrait

Email me at alchemycatbird@gmail.com with

a receipt of donation to one of the following: PCRF, UNRWA, a gofundme from Funds for Gaza and/or Operation Olive Branch; and

a photo/reference/description of the character you'd like me to draw.

I'll get back to you within a week with a proper scan of the drawing which you are free to use in non-commercial capacities with or without credit.

(And psst: if you live in Canada and donate more than $35 CAD i will send you the hard copy in untracked lettermail if you give me your mailing address.)

[suits-of-woe]

Viola is a gifted soccer player who's school has just cut girl's sports. When her twin brother Sebastian decides to go to London to chase a gig, Viola decides to enroll in his new school as her brother. "His" roommate Duke is both a complete hottie and the captain of the soccer team. In order to score a place on the team "Sebastian" agrees to help Duke get with his crush Olivia. However Olivia is totally gone for "Sebastian"! Shenanigans ensue as the difference between girls and guys in both love and sports is explored.

This is a hilarious and irreverent take on Twelfth Night starring Amanda Bynes and Channing Tatum. It's incredibly quotable, tons of fun, and a great modern adaptation.

Shirtless Channing Tatum. Positive messages about masculinity! Very quotable. Random acting part for Vinnie Jones. Amanda Bynes at her comedy peak! The shoehorning in of a Shakespeare quote at the end from a play that isn't twelfth night! Peak 2000s romcom

A high school take on the Malvolio Gulling subplot. Sixteen-year-old Marshall Gardner is 1) straight-laced, 2) exacting, 3) judgemental, and 4) perfectionistic. And below the surface, kept hidden from the rest of the world, he’s 5) controlled by his obsessions and compulsions, 6) fixated on the number twelve, 7) hopelessly in love with his best (only) friend, and 8) horrendously imperfect. He’s also 9) universally disliked, 10) the self-made enemy of the former GSA president, 11) just a little too easy to trick, and 12) in trouble.

This book is sooooo fucking good it’s my comfort read!!! Max asks the brave brave question of what if twelfth night was about a high schooler who i want to squeeze like a stress ball and it makes me feel insane. 12/10 book of all fucking time please read it

THIS STORY FUCKS. extremely hard. i read it before i even read twelfth night and let me tell you it works just as well as a stand-alone story as a retelling. it uses the subplot of twelfth night revolving around the servants (which deserves more attention, as a side note) to explore gender and neurodivergence and the inherent horror of being sixteen and it executes every theme extremely well. if you have maybe half an hour to spare honestly sit down and read the whole thing right now. it's so good. sir toby is a lesbian. what more could you want

read the whole thing here

[suits-of-woe]

Best Shakespeare Adaptation

since the 1600s, people have been rewriting shakespeare and writing spinoffs in good, bad, and frankly just kind of insane ways. today, they will compete until only one is left standing!

during the poll craze i ran a lot of brackets and had fun, but ended up with a couple spare blogs i ended up having to delete, so i'm running this one off my main.

q. is this a tournament for productions or adaptations?

a. adaptations! stuff that changes dialogue or medium (beyond play -> movie) or takes a really new spin on it! west side story counts, romeo and juliet (1996) doesn't.

q. will there be a limit on contestants?

i'll cut it at 64 or 32 depending on how many submissions we get! if we get a lot of adaptations of a few plays and less of others, i won't cut any of them out, but i'll make some of them face off in round one

q. are you biased?

yes. fortinbras sweep. i've been reading 'these violent delights' too and it's pretty good. oh and can't forget haider, and requiem of the rose king is an all timer... basically, yes i really like rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead, but i have much room in my heart

q. is it most best portrayal/analysis, or best on its own merits?

a. a little of both, but mostly the latter

q. does [x thing] (that's pretty different than the original inspiration) count?

a. if it is common knowledge that it's shakespeare inspired

q. does the lion king count?

a. yea

signal boosting! if yall great bracket blogs will help out @gayest-classiclit @byronicherobracket (this one's still in qualifiers, it seems cool!) @straightplayshowdown (this one's getting going again!) @bestadaptationtournament @gayestshakespearecouples

[suits-of-woe]

we joke about "irl kin drama" but as someone who's experienced probably the closest thing to that i can say with personal experience to back me up that it's honestly better it stays confined to the internet

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give us an unpopular shakespeare opinion. or two. or ten

let’s aim for ten!!

1. Julius Caesar: Let Portia stab the Soothsayer in her last scene, you cowards. He’s not important anymore, cut him out of the next scene. He looks like he’s going to warn Caesar, make her kill him. I don’t care change it

2. The “Bad Quarto” popularly-used arrangement of Hamlet, where the nunnery scene occurs previous to Hamlet’s first scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, while concise, sucks. The nunnery scene works best when Hamlet has just recently uncovered his friends’ deception, so Ophelia’s perceived betrayal stings that much more.

3. King Lear: Edmund is never cast hot enough. I feel this as strongly as I feel Hamlet is never cast young enough. And not like super masculine lumberjack hot either, Goneril and Regan and Cornwall all need to look at him and see the perfect bottom.

4. Titus Andronicus: Lavinia should survive/have her death faked and take the baby with her. Yeah no shh I don’t care.

5. Richard III only works to its full potential when looked at in conjunction with the three preceding Henry VI plays. The scene where Margaret coaches Queen Elizabeth on how to curse her enemies, is, to me, one of the most affecting scenes in all of Shakespeare, certainly in the histories, but it needs the background to really hit. I don’t… really have a solution to this, though.

6. Love’s Labour’s Lost is kinda underrated!!! There’s a LOT of weird not good shit in there but I firmly think the ladies and Boyet are some of Shakespeare’s most fun characters (and not just because I played Boyet shh) (Also Boyet is gay and that’s why they let him chaperone the ladies).

7. Jumping back to Hamlet again, do not cut Fortinbras at the end, what the fuck, I get that it’s a weird meh ending but there is NO emotional resolution to ending abruptly on Hamlet’s death.

8. If your Taming of the Shrew has BDSM undertones make Grumio Petruchio’s male sub!!!! (I have just obtained this opinion because I literally just finished reading Taming of the Shrew in full for the first time)

9. If you’re not doing Julius Caesar in period, you should cut/combine like… half of the characters. Also make a LOT more of them women. You can keep it gay, I promise.

10. Sampson and Gregory at the top of Romeo and Juliet should be a male/female couple with Sampson as a really scrappy young lady (in my head she’s a gangster moll) so that with a little rethinking you can make her lines less fucking gross (like think of it as “OHHHHHH because women are WEAK, I’ll show you, asshole”)

thank you for this

[suits-of-woe]

COMMISSION POST

hi! im issa / ink and i do comms :>

SKETCHES :

bust : $7 half body : $9 full body : $11 w / simple color : additional $2

FLAT COLOR :

bust : $9 half body : $11 full body : $15 bust : $9 half body : $11 full body : $15

FULLY SHADED :

bust : $12 half body : $15 full body : $20

more examples and information here!

[suits-of-woe]

TOP 10 THEATER ON AO3 BASED ON NUMBER OF FANWORKS, SINGLE CATEGORY TAGS ONLY VERSION (2009-2022)

If you want to see the Theater bar chart with the multi-category fandoms included, please check this post.

To make these bar chart race, all series titles in the Theater Category on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, manually filtered for fandoms belonging in only one category, and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.

Locked fanworks aren’t included in the count because Wayback Machine can’t view those, only Ao3 users can.

The high-ranking Les Miserables tags (Les Misérables - All Media Types & Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil) are both in multiple categories (Books & Literature & Theater) so it has been excluded in this bar chart. You can see it multicategory version.

Fandom tags that are no longer in the Theater category tag as of posting this are left out of the bar chart race. These tags are usually either miscategorized or already have other tags referring to the same fandom.

Please refer to this post for more fanfiction bar chart races.

Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏

[suits-of-woe]

the two gentlemen of verona is fun because it's (maybe) shakespeare's first play and there are a lot of elements in it (julia dressing up as a boy to serve the guy she's in love with, valentine's banishèd speech, etc) that you can tell he's sort of testing out and will refine later in better plays. but it's ALSO the only play in the canon with a dog in it. which leads me to conclude that dealing with crab was such an absolute nightmare in production that for the rest of his entire 36-play-long career shakespeare was like "holy fuck never again"

[suits-of-woe]

[suits-of-woe]

the two gentlemen of verona is fun because it's (maybe) shakespeare's first play and there are a lot of elements in it (julia dressing up as a boy to serve the guy she's in love with, valentine's banishèd speech, etc) that you can tell he's sort of testing out and will refine later in better plays. but it's ALSO the only play in the canon with a dog in it. which leads me to conclude that dealing with crab was such an absolute nightmare in production that for the rest of his entire 36-play-long career shakespeare was like "holy fuck never again"

[suits-of-woe]

My friend and I were discussing The Tempest at work and we were talking about Ariel’s big speech where he terrifies Prospero’s brother and Ferdinand’s father and how it might be difficult for an actor like me to pull that off.

“Unless of course,” I mused, “at this point Ariel just pulls a gun. Everything else is still historic, but Ariel. Just. Has a gun now.”

So now I’m wondering, if one (1) character in each Shakespeare play gets a gun, who is it?

(We did come to the conclusion that EVERYONE in Twelfth Night gets a gun except Orsino)

[suits-of-woe]

— Haruki Murakami from “Norwegian Wood.”

[suits-of-woe]

will u draw me some othello guys? maybe cassio and his friends :')

slightly gnc desdemona u are the world to me.