#Censored literature

[zachafoster]

Thoughts On Anger, Greed, and Living Below Human Potential

We just had another mass shooting in my country this weekend, this time it was a mall in a suburb of Dallas. Now some politicians are starting to blame our daily mass shootings on untreated mental health problems. As if we mentally ill aren’t already demonized. Statistically, a very small percentage of violent crimes are committed by mentally ill people. Mentally ill people are far more likely to…

[thepersonalwords]

You can control the visibility of my name and my popularity, but you cannot control the frequency at which people are quoting me. Truth always rises with time.

Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

[apostate-in-an-alcove]

People on BookTok will unironically diagnose every woman who reads smutty books with a porn addiction and call everyone who disagrees with their puritanical standards for books a gooner and then pat themselves on the back for being so moral and enlightened as if they're actually going to achieve anything of substance by doing this.

[professional-writher]

Just read The Epic of Gilgamesh. I can't believe the oldest written piece of literature of ever was tragic yaoi.

[leafylit]

“ — brought the revolver up and, deathly pale, her lower lip ashen and trembling, her large, black eyes glittering like fire, looked at him, her resolve now steady, taking aim and waiting for the first movement on his part. Never had he seen her so beautiful. The fire that glittered from her eyes at the moment she raised the revolver had almost physically scorched him, and his heart contracted with pain.”

Crime and punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[2bu]

continuously find it weird how the so called free speech and 'anti censorship' girlies endlessly blame kids and teenagers for how the internet has turned out when it's corporations and our own literal government to blame lmfao

especially when these hoes don't do anything to actually combat the literal censorship occurring in real fucking life right here right now on and offline

[gailyinthedark]

This is interesting because based on a typical 28-day menstrual cycle, it's about the soonest you could get married and be fairly sure you had conceived prior to your wedding night (assuming you didn't have sex during the two weeks in between).

I've wondered before how well medieval women understood their menstrual cycles, if they knew when ovulation happened, etc. This timeframe could be coincidence, of course, but if not, it would seem to indicate a pretty exact understanding.

I'd love to find more information on this.

[jitterymeg-01]

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde Manuscript Selected Quotes (crossed out)

“It is worse than wicker, it is silly. I hate Dorian Gray” - Lord Henry Wotton in response to Basil telling him how he is a slave to Dorian.

~

“…We walk home together from the club arm in arm or sit in the studio hold each other and talk of a thousand things. Now and then he is [illegible] however he is horribly thoughtless at times. he seems to take a real delight in giving me pain. I am quite in[illegible] it. I can imagine [yourself?] dont it. but not to him, not to him. Once or twice we have been away together though i have had him all to myself. I am becoming jealous of him of course. I never let him talk to me of the people he knows i like to isolate him from the rest of life as to think that he absolutely belongs to me. He does not, I know but it gives me pleasure to think that he does. I have given this young man my whole life who treats it as if it were a bloom to put in his coat.” - Basil, of Dorian

~

“Harry don’t talk like that. I am not afraid of things but I am afraid of words. I cannot understand how it is that no prophecy has ever been ineffable. Home has, I know. As set it seems to me that to say a thing is to bring it to pass. Whatever his joined expression becomes true, as what his not found expression can never happen. As in genius entity lower than beauty - it is only the transitory that stirs me. What is permanent is monotonic and produces no effect…” - Basil

~

““In my mind, Harry I trust you.” He spoke very slowly, as the words seemed wrung out of him, almost against his will.

“I don’t suppose I shall care for him, as I am quite sure he won’t care for me,” replied Lord Henry Wotton, smiling as he took Hallward by the arm and almost led him into the house.” -Beginning of Chapter 2

~

After this, there are not very many big groups of crossed out phrases because Basil is a coward who will never confess his love.

If you want to try to decipher these yourself search for The Picture of Dorian Gray manuscript. It is really hard to read, fair warning.

[ferretly]

So. That book club meeting was … interesting.

At one point, when we were discussing the author (shockingly, a leftist) who was complaining about pc-ness, one of the people just said, “yeah, when I was young, we said ret*rded all the time and it didn’t mean anything!” (Knowing full well that I’m autistic, because I’d struggled to speak often and felt the need to say why, like pretty early on)

And I tried to explain that like, personally, I don’t like the word, because it’s usually followed up with violence, even something minor—which is why eliminating it can help me and others feel safer around you. Not what “being pc” has become or anything, especially on social media, but

And this person just, you know, said it two more times and then went on about censorship and how the author was right to complain (the author being someone who also asked why being transracial wasn’t allowed if being transgender was…).

Anyway…

[josouhenshin]

let's see if I can recount how we got here in an organized way, for posterity- there's a popular post that's circulated through these parts a few times which contains a twitter thread talking about a crossdressing themed dress-up-slash-dating game (?) called trans' ~boku to atashi no kyoukaisen, released by software developer catear in 2002. I didn't get the impression that the twitter poster played the game, but they did surmise from supplementary materials that it was generally good natured and well thought out. neat. they also mention of a sequel called trans'2, which is an inherently funny name for something to have. notably trans'1 sounds like came off as (maybe?) mostly clean and trans'2 is more straightforwardly an eroge.

friends of the blog nettle and fennel did some digging and found links to the official sites for both trans' games (trans', trans'2), which thankfully are still up and running. however, everyone's browser hated the trans' 1 site (I assume it's some kind of non-unicode character disagreement) so further fixation was mostly about the sequel.

well that clears it all up nicely!

anyway with some digging, I found a store listing for a hard copy of trans'2 that included a garter belt in one of 4 colors, joining the (dubiously factual, but) long tradition of anime adjacent promos that include underwear. as they say, it goes hard.

fennel also found a style guide quiz on their site that asks you some questions about clothing/romantic/lifestyle preferences and points you towards one of the 8 romanceable characters and gives examples of clothes they like. neat.

Q: you're really a guy, right? I'm a guy... there's no doubt that I'm a girl! it's a secret ☆

...this is where we hit a snag, though. my japanese is not all that good, so I can kind of understand the gist of things, some of the time, but I can't really offer especially reliable or complete translations of anything. sorry. I do intend to include links wherever possible so if you do have more knowledge of these things you can probably get more out of this by skipping my bit. hopefully I can avoid saying anything especially misleading.

anyway, while poking around on the site I got the impression that two of said characters are kindred spirits (the full spread seems to be two girlies, two guys, and four cis girls), which really piqued my interest. as one may have noticed, there's kind of a dearth of t4t romance out there, and more generally romance by and for the TSTV girls instead of like, featuring us as the object of someone else's fantasy. this group sounded like they ought to be generally poised to deliver something pretty incredible.

well, there's only one way to find out, right?

Index next post

[urfavisproship]

Princess Twilight Sparkle from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is Proship!

Antis DNI

[lil-squiggy]

Badass granny

[sleepymarmot]

Bright Young Things (2003) / Vile Bodies (1930)

Yes, yes, of course I watched this for young gay Michael Sheen.

For real, the main entertainment factor of this film is embodying the Leo pointing meme every time a familiar face shows up on screen. At some point a certain someone appeared in an incidental role for a few seconds in a close-up next to Tennant and I completely fucking lost it. The UK can’t possibly have so few actors!

I’ve never even heard of the book this was based on, or was aware this was an adaptation before being informed in the opening titles, but it’s very noticeable. The script frantically jumps from plot point to plot point just like in any other feature film that tries to cram a novel in less than two hours of runtime. A bigger problem is that it’s not very clear to the viewer whether they should even try to make out a plot out of this string of scenes, or it’s a narrative that operates on vibes only. (I had to quickly leaf through previous scenes because I’d put a name to a wrong face, all while wondering if correcting myself was even worth it.) The film has a boisterous beginning, then slows down for a long time, then is given a shot of energy when James McAvoy’s character does a certain big thing halfway through (I cheered. Then I went “Oh man :/”). The plot does get a bit more coherent after that.

The ending caught me by surprise: I didn’t realize it was that late in the thirties. The radio announcement was a real “Guess he’ll die” moment, and it was immediately followed by a scene where the main character and his love interest seemed to poetically die on the same day… And then both of these were swiftly undone. The final scene was so conspicuously set during an air raid in a room filled with burning candles that I kept expecting the final frame to be a bomb hitting the building, or someone knocking over one of the candles — either way, with the pair being set ablaze just like the rediscovered manuscript. But no, it was just… a happy/bittersweet melodramatic ending? Instead of a neat destructive one? But I had already given up on the emotionally involved melodramatic mode of viewing because I’d written off the characters as unlikeable empty shells whom you study like a bug instead of rooting for! The girl didn’t even seem to like the boy and the boy sold her, what kind of emotion was their reunion supposed to evoke? And what happened to Agatha and Miles during/after the war? According to the summary on Wikipedia, the original novel’s ending is entirely different in content and tone, and much more in tune with the detached cynicism of the story up to the war, which makes me wonder even more about the adaptation’s intent.

It was nice to look at all these pretty people in fashionable clothes, and get a glimpse of a foreign historical setting. “Watching a random mildly obscure production because you’ve heard about it online and/or some star was in it” is a familiar, semi-forgotten experience, and that felt pleasantly nostalgic.

---

Of course, I couldn’t resist immediately reading the original book to compare, encouraged by a review saying that it’s actually not that long. I found a public domain version somewhere and read the bare original text without commentary, even though I’m sure it’s a terrible way to consume century-old satire.

I was surprised to discover that the book is from 1930 — and still ends with a great war (fictional, I assume). No wonder the adaptation moved the setting a decade forward!

My impression that the characters and their stories were supposed evoke curiosity and contempt rather than compassion was confirmed. I now find the shoehorned sappy ending even stranger. The film version turned out to be very faithful otherwise: the unimportant events and characters are condensed well, and the weird pacing and disjointedness that I perceived as a trait of sloppy adaptation were actually true to the source material.

The last chapters of the book feel different not because of the sudden bleakness, but because the scope is rapidly narrowed to the few main characters, and most of the secondary subplots are dropped. The book, unlike the adaptation, puts a definite end to Agatha’s story (and her life), and there’s an entire subplot about a fictional film that didn’t make it to the real film, but what about the Prime Minister and his unsuccessful courtship of a Japanese noblewoman, or Miles’ brother and his rejected proposal? I thought these were going somewhere.

What a shame that the misunderstanding about “shooting” didn’t make it to the adaptation — it’s one of the few passages in the novel I found genuinely funny. Speaking of dialogue, I thought the “parties” monologue in the film was very unnatural and theatrical, and sure, in the novel it’s not said aloud but belongs to the narrator.

The minor character who hosted the fateful party was in the novel actually, uhh, a major character from the writer’s previous novel who made money via human trafficking?? That would have been very confusing for the movie’s audience, so I think it was pretty clever to throw all that out and make her Miles’ mother instead. Too bad a more serious take on Miles warranted a new surname: “Miles Malpractice” is a great name.

Miles’ role was expanded a lot for the film, which I think we all agree was a good choice. Most of his lines in the movie, including the tearful goodbye, aren’t in the book at all! So that’s another thing that was made more dramatic for the film. You win some (Miles), you lose some (the ending). The moral of the story is… Stephen Fry is better at writing a gay character than a straight romance? No wonder; the question is why he even bothered with the latter.

[glassiewithab]

when someone says "president xi imma be real with you fire when ready" but victor jara said "Tío Ho, nuestra canción / Es fuego de puro amor / Es palomo palomar / Olivo de olivar / Es el canto universal / Cadena que hará triunfar / El derecho de vivir en paz"

[thatwritererinoriordan]

Banned Books for Kids: Reading Lists and Activities for Teaching Kids to Read Censored Literature

[vanyafresita]

actually, you know what ? im glad my ex gf ghosted me, i dodged a bullet it seems