#a lot of words

[keferon]

Yeah haha I finished the fic~

[smiling-psychopaths]

How did you do it? Luring your friends them in, trapping them. How'd you do it?

And what tortures did you use for them? Did you have different ones for each Critter or the same one?

I'm honestly kinda curious.

-@picky-piggy

"I didn't expect you to come here, well, be alerted, it's gruesome. I lured them here by simply inviting them one by one to my house, sneaking on them and injecting a sedative into them, by then I was still considered a very close friend to them. And torture methods, DogDay, I simply use a simple but effective method called 'searching for treasure', where I cut open his abdomen, and stick my hooves inside, rummaging around in there like I'm searching for something, it's really effective. CatNap, I often forcefully make him drink or eat stuff filled with caffeine, and inject adrenaline into him, he hasn't slept in... about an entire month, he constantly sees things and has a constant splitting headache. Hoppy.... I use electricity, simple but effective. Kickin, I got creative here, I cut small wounds onto his body, before I throw him into a pool of salt, it's very effective. CraftyCorn, I like breaking her bones, for some reason when they break, they crack the loudest, really satisfying for me. Bobby, often skin sections off her and just leave it at that, it's really effective. And this is just the torture methods I do when I want the most suffering, I usually do basic torture to all of them, I also often use medieval torture methods as well."

[richardazer]

Blame the mlp smile virus | my little worms | rainbow radiation for this

Kara (stressed)

Status: non infected, immune.

Health: 90%

Sanity: 98%

Thirst: 9%

Hunger: 0%

Inventory: axe; maps.

Gumi (paranoid, scared)

Status: non infected.

Health: 100%

Sanity: 94%

Thirst: 0%

Hunger: 0%

Inventory: med kit; personal documents of the group; multi-tool.

Pete (anxious, tired)

Status: non infected

Health: 98%

Sanity: 92%

Thirst: 10%

Hunger: 0%

Inventory: guitar case with weapons; ammo; rope; climbing equipment.

Sparklez (hungry)

Status: second stage infected, sanity intact with minor changes

Health: 80%

Sanity: 60%

Thirst: 20%

Hunger: 65%

Inventory: sleeping bag; portable stove; gas can; water; cans of food; blanket.

=====================

Got bitten when they were escaping the gun store. Immediate medical attention to the wound stopped the rot of soft tissue, bearable weakness.

Infection reached stage 2, most people would have gave into the hunger, Cap remained sane and in control of his body though urages have affected personality. Physical activity keeps him sane, assigned to do all heavy lifting.

[ladyamaranta]

I'm surprised by how much I like Kirin. Not saying he is flawless, but I basically like every layer he has and even his flaws.

The character's development they did for him was fast, but I didn't like this trope subversion less because of this. When I say 'fast' I mean that I basically started ep.5 thinking about how bad it was for Josh to be paired with the "Chad" after the trauma he had gone through, and I ended that episode sure that Kirin was my fav (boy) character and also my fav person on the boys' island.

So, some consideration in no particular order:

- either Kirin has a natural talent to spot signs of abuse, or he has more backstory than what we have been made aware of so far. He frowns even before he sees the red marks on Josh's chest, reacting only based on his avoidance. He says and does what's right, not only he stays 100% firm in his decision to believe Josh but he also state that decision aloud multiple times. I see backstory here and I want it.

- not straight. He has a not-straight energy that is incredibly big. He's the Sports Jock and the "Chad" but his backstory has no girls in it: we don't see him with a girl not even in a fragment; he's not pictured as an heartbreaker, which usually pairs really well with the archetype of the Conventionally Attractive Popular School Bully Captain; he could have been busy with practise, sure, but from the point of the writers I see this as a deliberate storytelling choice to hint at something (or at least I hope so)

- he's funny. I find him genuinely funny.

- he's the natural leader, but he is also kinda the group mom. And his attentions to the others are so casual and natural that you fail to notice them at first: how he hugs Bo on the cliff, how he cooks and shares food, how he always has an eye on the others. It comes so naturally to him and therefore I want to know more about the "dad part" he gets to play and his siblings

- he may be a "act now think later (or never)" kind of person, but he is not a bad person. I ended up thinking about "bad boy, good man" as the perfect quote for him during one of the episodes.

- I'm not excusing what he said to Ivan in the flashback, but I really see that moment as nuanced. He said awful things, no doubts about that, but what I see in that scene is this: a drunk and sad schoolboy caught in the middle of a breakdown whose first reaction is to firmly state he is not an homophobe/racist (not sure about which one he was going for as the sentence is cut off) and to refuse to repeat the insults Ivan is putting in his mouth. In other words I don't see him as a racist and/or homophobe who is ready to insult people and happy to do so given the chance; and I see this because he does not come up with bad words he was refraining himself from using but is glad to let out, he repeats exactly what Ivan was telling him to say; I don't see any joy in him as the words come out of his mouth, I only see a broken young boy who is being provoked in a moment of fragility. Also, surely enough Ivan and him have more backstory, otherwise Ivan's provocation is unexplicable: we haven't seen Kirin doing anything bad up to this moment, so I don't get why Ivan starts this provocation. Therefore I suspend my judgment on this moment (and on both Ivan and Kirin before the island) until I know more about their relationship and what led to that moment in the locker room.

- his interview draws a lot of parallels to Toni and I like this a lot

- I'm really praying they'll use this magnificent example of "Archetype: Chad" to subvert the 'boys will be boys' trope and to show us a boy who is stupid and impulsive and everything a 'boy' is, but is also inherently a good person.

ALSO why he is officially listed as "Kirin O'Connor" but everyone on tumblr tags him as "Kirin O'Conner"?

[writer-rider-flirty-thirties]

Yesterday (1/23) was the first anniversary of my very first Miraculous fic, Struggling. It's unbelievable that it's been a whole year since I started writing Miraculous things! I'm excited to see if I slow down, keep pace, or write even more in this coming year!

(reusing the gif from one of my first Miraculous posts as well lol)

[fanta2y]

alright guys i don’t usually post myself on here but i need a place to infodump in peace and my friends are tired of me…sooooo :) this is anime spoilers kinda, im caught up with the anime and sorta caught up with the manga for jjk so proceed with caution!!

———————————————————————————

what i love most about the parallel or the writing choice to express sukuna as fire and destruction and yuuji as like a snow storm and ice is because of the differences that with which they are perceived.

fire is know to be bad, it always has been bad and the people who enjoy it, more often than not, find joy in the destruction but there is no one who doesn’t believe fire DOESNT hurt like if you touch it you get burned. this matches sukunas power type and just overall personality well, you get too close he will kill you unless you have some use to him.

with yuuji he’s nice he’s sweet he’s cute he has a strong moral compass, much like a snow day you don’t think anything particularly wrong with a snow day you can enjoy it and have fun and it won’t hurt you at first. but spend too long in the snow, and then you get hypothermia. much like how mahito pushes yuuji too far and gets his ass beat. also the way hypothermia works, right before like it gets REALLY bad your brain tricks itself into thinking your warm. like the parts of your body that are experiencing hypothermia will begin to feel warm again it won’t feel as bad and most people are tricked into thinking everything is okay,

i like this because it’s similar to the way mahito drew himself into this false sense of security when it came to fighting yuuji. he knew he wouldn’t go too far or do certain things because of his morale compass, and much like how you get warm before you die of hypothermia. mahito got comfortable pushing yuji because he convinced himself he wouldn’t fight back, not in anyway that would hurt mahito permanently. until he did, until it was too late.

UGH GEGE YOUR A GENIUS .

——————————————————————————

i’ve always had like a thought about the fact that yuuji was perceived as ice and sukunas main thing is like fire and very red colored things. so i was thinking about it and then this came to mind and honestly it’s so good like even if it’s not what gege intended when writing it i still think it’s cool !!

who knows i might be doing more i have a notes FULL of fun little things ive noticed within jjk that i just type away whenever it comes to me so … :))

[esfordays]

Uhm

[dreamer-oriented-express-1]

Omg...

My John Wick sequel fic is like...REALLY long...it's 2,000 some words right now...I hope some of y'all are bookworms or like to read long passages...cuz...YIKES! Now I'm scared...

[zilabee]

Lennon's late again. [...] I'm thinking of getting rid of him.

I don't even have that much sadness attached to day four; it's drowned out by pure unadulterated irritation. I almost don't even want to write about it because it's just makes me furious.

The best bits of the day:

- Yoko dancing a little bit to Maxwell

- Adding the old footage and the screaming to them playing around with rock and roll music oh my god beautiful yes perfect well done yes okay good

- Nothings' gonna change my world ("I wish it fucking would")

- George's smile at Mal when he gets his hammer bit right oh god

- When Paul genuinely doesn't know who played that lovely badumbadum in Maxwell and is all flustered by how much he likes it

- When John has his paper over the mic, and someone tells Paul instead of telling John. HEAVEN.

- Paul writing Get Back obviously all of that, but also the others slowly drifting into it, how good it sounds when Ringo falls in.

- When Michael Lindsay Hogg suddenly realises he might actually be breaking the beatles up and quickly suggests leaving them alone to play for a bit and then sending them for something to eat.

The worst bits of the day:

MLH: I think if we've embarked on the enterprise, which is your decision... after all you're all here... I think we ought to get as much as we can out of it because... Paul: But any other director in the world would say 'Fuck off!' you know. 'Fucking get off my set, you cunt!' You know, wouldn't they? If suddenly in the middle of a thing I was doing, trying to pull together, four people just sort of shout, 'I don't think we want to do it' you'd go 'oh fuck off.' Anybody... I couldn't operate with that. MLH: It's true.

HE IS LITERALLY TELLING YOU WHAT THEY NEED, AND YOU ARE JUST MAKING NOTHING NOISES IN RETURN, YOU ARE A FUCKING NIGHTMARE.

MLfH: I think one of the things about doing the show here is that it's too easy.

OH YES NO OBVIOUSLY. IT WOULD BE AWFUL IF ANY OF THIS WAS TOO EASY.

MLH: I will, every day, say Tripoli...

I HATE YOU

MLH: We all need you. And you know, if you all can't get it together, that's really very sad.

TAKE A SAD SONG AND MAKE IT BETTER MICHAEL, NOT WORSE

- oh god how stupid and tedious and awful everyone has chosen to be. I hate them.

- (except paul) (but even paul) (but not paul) I know there are other things he could have done here, but he's channelling my irritation so perfectly that I don't find him irritating today. I found him irritating yesterday, but today everyone's being ridiculous and needs to fuck off and he explains that just fine. My teeth ache for him.

- They're all so tangled up and tired and scared, and I feel like I should feel caring and loving about that, but I don't, I'm just frustrated, and want them to pull themselves together.

- I love Paul just telling them straight that he doesn't care enough for how painful they're making it because fucking hell he's not at school any more.

- I love John's incentive for the thing being to beam love at people, it's very beatle. And incentive is something they need and it's a good one, and it would make Brian happy. But !!!! If you're on the side of doing a show and making the thing work, then you have to argue on the side of doing a show and making it work. You have to be part of forcing that to happen. Get involved. Back Paul up. Just be in the roomas ldfkjowiejfo sjdfoijwoe ijfsdf.

- George deciding he doesn't even want to do his songs is the breaking point for me. When suddenly he doesn't even want to do them live because they'll be shit, when just yesterday he was saying how good this whole idea was because it's more real, and when, like Paul says, they're more than CAPABLE of singing a fucking song for fuck's sake flsskjodijflhklsdsslsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss. I don't know. I know he's frightened. And I know he has a little ptsd about audiences. And I know he has a lot going on. But at the same time… and I'm a youngest child so I'm allowed to say this: he's the most youngest child of all youngest children I've ever seen and I don't know how anybody coped with him for a whole minute.

[abonent-nedostupen-navsegda]

[lamentable-comedy]

The Rest is Silence: Arden, Adaptation, and Narrative Stewardship

hey remember when i announced my intention to write an essay on arden and then didn't do it for two years because i was waiting for season 2B to come out and then... just kept not doing it? Well I finally wrote it and it's below the cut

i. Narrative Stewardship

Narrative stewardship is a term that you’ve never heard before because I invented it to describe who is entrusted with telling a story and when. It goes beyond just a matter of perspective or narrative voice, and specifically addresses in-universe instances of characters shouldering the responsibility of telling the story. And this can be varying degrees of explicit in terms of how it occurs.

One of my favourite less explicit examples of this is The World’s End. The film opens with narration from Gary, placing the story of the first golden mile firmly in Gary’s stewardship, and implicitly setting you up to think of the events of the movie from his perspective. However, it ends with narration from Andy, telling a group of people about the events of the film and retroactively applying his perspective to the story. The narrative has now passed into his care, and he is the one sharing it and bringing it forward. However, this switch isn’t the result of any explicit conversation that Gary and Andy have, nor does it directly represent that everything we’ve seen is something that Andy has been telling-- there are scenes that he just wasn’t there for, for one thing-- whatever version he tells the other people in the circle, it isn’t exactly what we’ve seen. The point is that the story of the first golden mile is in Gary’s care, and the second in Andy’s. In this instance, drawing attention to stewardship serves more of a thematic purpose in order to underscore the point that the movie is making about the past and how we interact with it.

For a more literal example, you can look at The Lord of the Rings. In-universe, the books that you read when you read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are a translation of The Red Book of Westmarch, which was primarily written by Bilbo and Frodo, and that is finished by Sam. Frodo directly, in the story, tasks Sam with the work of writing the end, and there’s analysis out there that pinpoints where that shift happens to within a few lines.

So that’s narrative stewardship. It doesn’t always have to be defined by a shift from one character to another, and there’s a lot of other situations under which it can be applied, probably some that I haven’t even thought of, but that’s more or less what I mean when I use the term, and it’s a concept that I think about a lot when it comes up.

Arden interacts with the concept of narrative stewardship on a number of occasions, first and most obviously, in its format as a true crime podcast. Throughout season one, Bea and Brenda are telling the story of Ralph and Julie. They have not been entrusted with this story by the people it actually concerns, they have taken it on themselves, and they’re each doing it for different but similar reasons. Bea sets out to tell Julie Capsom’s story. Not just to share and find out what happened to her, but because of a connection she feels she has with Julie, and because she feels she has some responsibility or duty to be the one to say what happens. Brenda is there for Ralph. She barges in and kind of strong-arms her way onto the in-universe Arden podcast because she wants to make sure that Ralph’s end of the story is being done justice, and at the core of her involvement in the rest of the season is the desire to prove that Ralph isn’t to blame for Julie going missing.

Bea and Brenda each feel that they have some responsibility to one of the key players in the story of season one, and both feel they have some right to tell the story because of their initial involvement at the time, Bea as a reporter and Brenda as one of the police officers investigating Julie’s disappearance. And the story was public enough at the time and it’s been long enough that the rest of Wheyface, the public, and Ralph and Julie’s friends and family all just... let them proceed with that goal.

However.

Julie and Ralph don’t want their story to be told. They don’t even want to be the ones telling it, they left it unresolved with intent. So when they do step in and are all but forced to take over stewardship of their own story from Bea and Brenda, it’s an act of self defence almost. They don’t want to be doing it, but they need to in order to justify, or at least explain, their actions. Of course, in-universe “Episode 11: The Monsters Who Did It” doesn’t actually exist, but the in universe equivalent of this reluctant re-possession of their story is when Julie agrees to answer Bea and Brenda’s questions on mic when they find her. Of course, doing so means owning up to her past actions. In season one of Arden, narrative stewardship means responsibility. Julie’s responsibility for the crimes she committed in order to orchestrate her disappearance, and the responsibility of Bea, Brenda, and the rest of the Arden team for negatively affecting the lives of at least three people.

So of course for season two they change things up a little.

Dana Hamill wants her story to be told.

Dana Hamill wants her story to be told by the Arden crew, to as wide an audience as possible.

Dana Hamill wants the world to know what happened to her Dad and why the actions of her uncle and, to a lesser extent, her mother, should be considered suspect in the light of what happened.

The question of narrative stewardship shifts in season two. The matter of how one person’s memory of the past can differ from another’s, and how that affects how they tell the story of what happened comes up directly a number of times-- Dana’s impression of her father as compared to those of Trudy and Clyde, Dana and Olivia’s differing perspectives on their past relationship, the different things that Bea and Brenda take from their initial interactions in 2007 and how that effects their present relationship... But the most noteworthy places for our purposes are the shift in the form that the podcast takes, and one Rosalind Ursula.

The Arden team is aware that, after the disaster that was the end of season one, they need to be more careful with how they approach season two, and as a result the episodes that we are hearing are not at all what the in-universe podcast, A Town Called Elsinore, actually consists of. So while Bea and Brenda are trying to tell Dana’s story, we aren’t just getting their version of that story. Moreover, their perspective on what the story is that they are telling is very different from Dana’s perspective on the story she wants them to tell. They are more aware of the possible consequences of taking responsibility for telling this story, and so they are more wary of fully doing so.

Which... brings us back to Rosalind.

Rosalind takes her first name from the main character of As You Like It, a character who would definitely, 100%, no doubt, get along with Hamlet so very well that one of my main takeaways from this podcast is turning over that possibility in my mind. Her last name, Ursula, is a nod to a minor character from Much Ado About Nothing, which ties her into Brenda and Bea as reimaginings of Benedict and Beatrice, but other than that doesn’t have much of a bearing on her character. Like, she’s not an adaptation of Ursula in any form. And it's interesting to note that she is one of the few characters in the podcast who is based on a Shakespeare character, but who is brought in without bringing in other elements of the play from which they are is taken. The only other contribution As You Like It has made to Arden is the title, but even that is more strongly connected to the real-life forest of Arden near Shakespeare’s home town than it is the fictional Arden in As You Like It’s France. Even Andy Wheyface is actually surprisingly similar to Andrew Aguecheek what with his willingness to throw his money around and comedic attempt to get married with vague motivations as to why he actually wants to, though that is retained without importing much else from Twelfth Night. The only other Twelfth Night reference being Malcolm Volio in season one.

But Rosalind! She does bear a similarity to her Shakespearean namesake in terms of character, but not at all in terms of role. And the fact that she has been taken so entirely out of her original context essentially gives her leeway to be a more flexible character for the writers while still maintaining a connection to Shakespeare. And what the writers do with that... is make her Horatio.

I can still remember listening to season two for the first time, and realizing that Rosalind was going to be acting as Horatio and... I think I literally got goosebumps? Because Horatio... Horatio is the person who has stewardship of the story of Hamlet. Hamlet entrusts him, at the end of the play with the task of telling this story. In the world of Hamlet, the only way that the story of all of death and tragedy-- the “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts”-- gets told, is because of Horatio. And we know that he does tell it, at least once, to Fortinbras, when he shows up at the end of the play.

Dana gets Rosalind to tell her story. She contacts Arden generally, but Rosalind is the one who does the groundwork of flying out to Montana and looking into Dana’s story in preparation for the in-universe season 2. And as a result of befriending Dana, Rosalind is swayed to her perspective on events, and becomes the only person on the Arden team advocating for the version of the story that Dana wants them to tell. This interacts with some other aspects of adaptation in some ways that I’ll get to in a moment, but first and foremost it makes her... a really good Horatio. By which I mostly mean it makes her a very Horatio Horatio. She really takes her responsibility as the steward of Dana’s story, as the person entrusted with her version of events, very seriously. To Rosalind, this is Dana’s story-- much as in season one Bea saw the events as Julie’s story almost to the exclusion of Ralph-- and so, first and foremost, Rosalind sees Arden’s responsibility in telling the story doing right by Dana. At least until she realizes that she's gotten too close to Dana and comes clean to the rest of the crew about the gaps in Dana’s story.

Season two asks questions about the role of objectivity in narrative stewardship, because if someone asks you to tell their story-- the story of what happened to them, and what they did, what happens when that conflicts with just telling the story of what happened?

ii. Adaptation and Narrative Tension

Arden isn’t fully an adaptation. Partially because it’s got so much original stuff that there are whole storylines that can’t be found in Shakespeare, but partially because it’s never a straight-up retelling of any of the plays that it takes on. There’s always enough distance from Shakespeare’s actual text, story, and themes that despite the obvious influence, it also stands on it’s own as a new version of an older story.

Which is actually very in line with how Shakespeare approached his plays. With very few exceptions, (Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merry Wives of Windsor, and The Tempest) they're all based on existing stories or historical events. Some plays are the result of combining two stories, and faithfulness varies greatly between different plays, but in general, Shakespeare plays aren’t original. They’re just really good at standing on their own.

But none of Shakespeare’s plays are mysteries. There aren’t really twists or reveals. Villains tell the audience what they’re up to, the Chorus synopsizes events for you before they happen, foreknowledge of the ending will not in any way hamper your enjoyment of the story. So Arden is actually given a very difficult task in terms of adapting stories that everyone knows into a true crime format where the reveal of what happened and who did it needs to actually hold some weight. That approach to adapting the plays essentially requires a genre shift, because the aims of a mystery are directly at odds with the aims of the kinds of tragedies that Shakespeare wrote. And the really amazing thing is how it’s done differently in the two seasons.

Everyone knows how Romeo and Juliet ends. The prologue of the play tells you how it ends just in case you didn’t know. And, listening to season one of Arden, you already know what happened to Ralph and Julie, because you know they’re Romeo and Juliet. Well. You should know they’re Romeo and Juliet. You might not know the details, but you know they’re dead, and you know they died together. Season one relies on that foreknowledge to keep both the real-world audience and the in-fiction audience engaged. Even if you somehow managed to miss the fact that Ralph Montgomery and Julie Capsom are Romeo and Juliet, in-fiction, everyone making and listening to the show knows what happened to Julie Capsom. All that blood? The crashed car? She for sure died. They just don’t know how.

So, when the twist is revealed and it turns out that they’re not only not dead, but still together? And thriving? You, like the in-universe are surprised by it! It’s like. Undoing any dramatic irony that existed in the original.

Also, if you’re me, you’re kind of more emotionally affected by that twist than you are by the original ending. Because you were prepared for them to be dead, gosh-darn-it, you were prepared for that because you’ve had years to accept it-- but for them to be alive and happy? You wrote a story where they’re ALIVE and HAPPY?? How dare you. How dare you change their fates and show me what could have been, because now the fact that this story has ended in death for four hundred years is sadder.

Anyway.

Season two, builds on that. Season two is an elevation of season one in pretty much every way, honestly, and with that comes an even further departure from the source material and a more deliberate obfuscation of what an audience expects from Hamlet. Because in order for the mystery to sustained in a manner which fits a story of an investigation, we can’t have our Hamlet given concrete knowledge of the culprit, heard from the murder victim, right at the start of the story. Yes, in Hamlet, Hamlet has his doubts about the information that the ghost gives him and that’s part of why it takes him a while to kill Claudius, but the audience doesn’t really have their doubts. We know. Both because of the narrative itself, and because Hamlet is, um. Very famous.

So, Arden season two lacks a clearly articulate ghost describing his murder in detail. The listener is still predisposed to suspect Clyde because they have read or seen or are at least culturally aware of Hamlet, but that suspicion is shaken by remembering that they changed how the story went in season one, so... who knows what could happen. And the further season two of Arden departs from the source material, the less sure you you can be of who’s going to make it out okay.

And this is an amazing exercise in getting you to think about the story differently, because the way Hamlet is written-- giving an audience knowledge as to what Hamlet it doing and why, by showing us his interaction with the ghost-- makes Hamlet’s actions and the fact that he suspects Claudius the way that he does more or less make sense to us in a way that it doesn’t to the majority of the characters. We know that he has his reasons for all of the weird stuff he’s doing, and even if you don’t agree with how he goes about it, you’re still able to see the justification in it. To the other characters in the play-- with the notable exception of Horatio-- his actions are absolutely wild, and Hamlet’s entire plan relies on that.

In Arden, we’re not following Dana directly. We’re following her via Bea and Brenda’s investigation, and that investigation is also following all of the other major players in the town. That shift in how we are presented with our Hamlet figure removes the perspective of knowing who (probably, if ghosts are to be believed) dunnit, even if some shadow of it is still there because of cultural knowledge of Hamlet. It’s basically asking you to relate not to Hamlet, but to Claudius and Gertrude and Ophelia and Polonius-- all the people who are worried about just what Hamlet is up to and that... that is an amazing trick to pull off.

Let’s go back to Rosalind and Horatio. Because Horatio is actually monumentally important to the audience’s understanding of Hamlet as a person for much of the play, and Arden puts that into a much sharper focus by having Rosalind literally trying to shape what the in-universe audience hears of Dana and the story, to the point of deleting footage that might incriminate Dana and interfering with Brenda and Bea’s investigation. Horatio is tasked by Hamlet with telling his story, and Arden asks us to question the ethics of that in the framework of true crime, as well as asking us to question Horatio’s objectivity. It’s asking “but what if Hamlet wasn’t right? What if Claudius didn’t do it?” and that... I don’t even know what to do with that.

Now, no discussion of our access to Dana’s inner thoughts and motivations would be complete without the matter of the soliloquies. In Arden, the soliloquies are fantastically adapted into Dana’s songs. They serve the same purpose as a soliloquy in that they give us some insight into Dana’s thought process, but they also emphasize the element of performance that is at play in Dana’s actions. Performance is such a big part of Hamlet’s actions, in the play. There’s a really amazing ambiguity to just how much of his actions are performance and when he’s performing and when he isn’t that can vary from production to production. Is Hamlet aware that Polonius and Claudius are spying on him during “to be or not be”, for instance. Some of Dana’s songs happen in more private moments-- “Show ‘Em I Mean Business”, arguably “Watch the Fire”-- but most of them are in public, drawing the audience’s attention to the fact that, while Dana’s emotions about her father’s death and the ensuing situation are genuine, on some level she is still performing. And when and how she is performing, not to mention for whom, is immensely interesting.

iii. Conclusion

In the commentary episode for season 2, episode 6, Christopher Dole expresses the aspect of true crime ethics that Arden explores as "who has the right to tell another person's story? [...] And what is the storyteller getting out of choosing this story?" While these questions are of course relevant to questions of true crime, I think they also have bearing over the matter of adaptation, and the matter of theatre. Theatre is unique in that the exact same story, the same script, gets told over and over in many different forms, with different actors and blocking and set and what have you. Shakespeare, as the meeting point of theatre stories that have had cultural relevance for a long time, is a nexus of two forms of repeating and retelling the same story. Arden, both in the act of adapting and retelling Shakespeare, and in the way it chooses to adapt and retell Shakespeare, asks questions about how we frame narratives, who gets to tell stories, and what stories are chosen to be told.

[mello-when-hi]

Hey, my latest fic just bumped my AO3 word count to 100K!! That’s pretty fuckin epic I think

[noratheelk]

I just think I should document this somewhere. So, I’m dyslexic. I recently bought a book: ‘Star Trek: The Vulcan Academy Murders’ it’s a tie-in novel. The book itself doesn’t really matter. I don’t usually read books with my eyes because the dyslexia makes it an incredibly slow and draining task. I usually stick to audiobooks but this book didn’t have an audiobook form, and it’s a lot harder to read a page of an audiobook when the teacher is talking than it is to look at a page in a physical book. So I read my book, it took me about a week. I was also really tired all week. And I was sleeping just as much if not more than I usually do, still, I was almost falling asleep in class and had almost no energy for anything. When I finished my book, I was back to my upbeat, energetic self. I understand that correlation is not causation and I’ll need to read a few more books to test this hypothesis but it would seem that reading a book, the way normal, non-dyslexic people do, is so cognitively draining for me that I physically cannot do it at the same rate as others. On one hand, this really validated my experience and frustration with reading. But another part of me is sad that I’ll never be able to read books with the ease and efficiency of some of my peers.

[sketchy-aura]

Talked about this on Discord but here's some Undertale and TMC parallels for an AU i have in my brain. Made a cut so that you dont haveto scroll too much lmao

Papyrus as Adam - I KEEP SEEING PEOPLE PUT HIM AS SANS AND THAT IS NOT FUCKING TRUE because Adam loves the exploring he loves everythin about it BUT HE'S STILL MATURE like Papyrus is mature. he makes puns of his own in-game!!!! like!!! he's just eccentric and Adam could be taken as eccentric, just the other end personality wise but I still think its a better fit than Sans

Sans as Jonah - first of all. the jacket. the jacket. second of all, like. Jonah's a jokester he's a lot more laid back than Adam is. like Papyrus and Adam are uptight a lot of the time and are super serious about what they do. but like. Sans and Jonah? They don't really care!! They're just here because their respective partners in crime made them be here and they want to support them!!!! and they both really do care about their brothers- figuratively or literally- deep down somewhere, and worry about them all the time

Gaster as Sarah - Both started it all man. both started it ALL- as in Sarah starting BPS, and Gaster being the first Royal Scientist and guess what? Both of them quit their respective jobs!!one in a much more gruesome way than the other!! But if you're dead that counts as quitting and both also watch over what happens after they quit their jobs!! We see references to Gaster watching the player all throughout Undertale, and Sarah was also stalking the cameras watching Adam and Thatcher

I also think that the royal guard could be interpreted as sort of like. The MCPD? They do similar roles.and I think it would be interesting to see Ruth as Undyne because even though Ruth doesnt seem as angry and aggressive as Undyne, both still seem pretty loyal of their jobs and fiercely protective of whom they care about

Thatcher as Asgore - both of those bitches got REGRET up the WAZOO they're both very wet cats and, according to Presto, both "doomed" their respective homes- Asgore with the Underground, and Thatcher with- apparently the world???

Gabriel as Flowey - because yk. Deception of being nice when actually they're a horror beyond human comprehension.........

Intruder as Toriel - even though they're not really. Normal. I mean Intruder's beyond comprehension as well and Toriel has just been through a lot. But both still take on a parental role at some point

Mark as Chara - So like both Mark and Chara are seen as like. Victim of circumstance right?? Mark was trapped in his room for DAYS before dying, Chara was attacked by their own kind and sacrificed themself for Asriel. We can see that as a parellel because Mark killed himself because of Gabriel's kind, and Chara killed themself for Asriel's kind- and since Flowey = Asriel, Mark would have killed himself for Gabriel, instead of because of Gabriel like in canon But like. the parellel is still there Because both Chara and Mark are still fairly calm!!! Like we can see in the flashbacks that Chara was never shown causing trouble, they were a good kid. And Mark went out all that way to go help his good friend Cesar. they're both good people but corrupt them enough and they go crazy (as we saw in many iterations of Vol 333 where the voice saying "sound familiar?" is Mark, and then with Chara in the genocide route) Also in the genocide route Chara fully controls Frisk and causes them to kill Flowey, which in the context of Gabriel being Flowey, is something Mark would certainly do, should his anger be awakened too much. Like Gabriel's an Alternate. Why not take the opportunity to kill the thing that started this whole mess?

Cesar as Frisk - both Frisk and Cesar both have no idea whats going on ever and are somehow alive despite everything. Despite everything, it's still you.

This also leaves the other fallen children as missing kids from the Alternate attacks, which can add more grief onto Thatcher/Asgore. thank you for coming to my tedtalk

[tomatoshapedstars]

hey quick question for people who watched 2012 TMNT, at which episode does it start to not feel like the characters have 1 or 2 personality traits because I tried watching the first 2 episodes and oh boy.

[cloudsmachinations]

We’ve done it folks, the first 20k done for my post-dsod self-indulgent puzzle fic 🥳🥳🥳🥳