#and the fact that they’re doomed by the narrative.

[vesemirsexual]

not a ciri/mistle shipper, not a ciri/mistle anti, but a secret third thing

[yuehua8]

#vashwoodweek day 2: “the way to know life is to love many things”

I wanted to add more to this and make it like, a mini comic or something but school is literally kicking my ass so. Just a sketch 😔. I might not do all of vashwoodweek so I can make better quality paintings while not failing school lmfao

[cupiditzy]

indulgent sketchy comic based on a scene that happened at the beginning of our last cos session

[le-agent-egg]

leon and sayaka save me

[blueish-bird]

burnout is sapping my hyperfixation of creative energy, but not to worry! I’m still thinking about Aki and Angel an incredibly abnormal amount

[vampire-wizard-solidarity]

a lot of people have already pointed out how totk has a lot of themes of imperialism and generally leans conservative ideologically, but what i think is interesting is how totk subtly redefines what a “researcher” is.

zelda wants to be a researcher in botw, and what this means in the context of botw is largely someone who works with sheikah technology. she wants to figure out ancient sheikah tech, she has an interest in botany and otherwise nature and biology (the whole silent princess and the frog thing), robbie and purah, the two characters who are the closest to us seeing what a researcher in the context of botw is are basically inventors. in totk, however, the main researchers who are presented to us are all historians.

this is an interesting pivot, because in botw zelda is not really interested in history. if anything, the one who’s deeply concerned with history is rhoam, wanting to preserve historical tradition and his uncritical reliance on said tradition and historical precedent is what leads them to their doom. in botw, zelda is narratively opposed to history, if anything, all the ancient tech backfires on them and traditions fail to awaken zelda’s power. zelda’s urge to be a researcher is in wanting to understand the world around her, not just blindly follow ancient plans but rather have agency within them.

totk, however, is obsessed with ancient plans. the only real moment where zelda gets to geek out in totk is her getting all giddy about finding out more about the divine origins of hyrule. all the researchers in the game are concerned with finding out more about the zonai. since all the mentions of ancient sheikah technology are scrubbed from the game purah and robbie read more as strange outliers, the sheikah slate is no longer, now it’s the purah pad, a product of purah rather than something larger. the whole game is literally about following an ancient plan, a plan most characters don’t fully understand as they sign up for it. totk’s main story is built on confusion, on the characters not knowing what’s fully going on but having faith in ancient sages telling them what to do. in botw, following ancient plans you don’t fully understand was the thing that doomed you. in totk, following ancient plans you don’t fully understand is the gimmick.

that juxtaposition between the two games has an ideological through line: botw posits that progress is necessary. mindlessly relying on tradition doesn’t work. prophecies are omens, not instructions. history must be learnt from, not repeated. the ancient sheikah aren’t a group to be emulated, but rather to be learnt from, considering their machinery backfired and the royal family betrayed them. totk, however, is obsessed with the mythical history of hyrule, a time where everything was idyllic until one bad man showed up, a time we must emulate in order to win. i already talked about how the past in totk is zelda’s life pre calamity but better here, but that also plays into the idolisation of that era and its royalty. in botw, even the myth of the first calamity preserves the fact that the yiga clan has origins in the royal’s family persecution of the sheikah, even the time when they successfully held back the calamity is tinged with mistakes that still affect the world ten thousand years later. in totk, ganondorf’s origins are nebulous. nobody provoked him, nobody did anything wrong, he’s just evil because he is.

a lot of right wing ideologies are hinged on preservation, but more than that: the belief in the nebulous mythical past in which everything was better. “make america great again”, the fascist’s idolisation of ancient rome which is represented largely inaccurately, look at any conservative rhetoric and you’ll see people complaining about how things nowadays are ruined or are being ruined, how in the past things were this way and they’re not anymore, which is bad. the belief in the fact that in some past period we were great and are not anymore, and the strive to emulate that past is a trait highly typical of right wing ideologies. and in totk the past as a great era is an idea presented completely uncritically, the narrative is entirely controlled by the game and doesn’t dwell on any of the inconsistencies in this idea.

now, obviously, not every story in which a great ancient era exists is fascist, right wing or conservative. but to me what’s interesting specifically in totk is this shift between the two games: botw is critical of the past. it’s critical of arrogantly repeating history, it’s critical of having blind faith in great relics of the past. totk isn’t. totk idolizes the past, totk tells legends and tells you to believe them without any doubts. botw believes researchers are those who seek to understand the world, innovate it and solve problems without relying on ancient ways. totk believes researchers are those who discover ancient instructions, ancient ways and relay them to great men in the present to be followed. the four mainline regional quests in botw are about discovering four ancient relics that are terrorising the land and fixing the mistakes of the past. the four mainline regional quests in totk are about discovering four ancient legends are true, and receiving instructions from an ancient sage on what to do.

totk is not simply neutral, it is ideologically conservative in stark contrast to botw, because of the things it chooses to leave uncriticised, notably the things botw was very poignant about examining critically. the way totk redefines what is a researcher is indicative of this, indicative of the way it chooses to idolize or present as an unexamined good that which was nuanced in botw. totk isn’t just conservative in the sense that it presents uncritically a “good king” and “evil conquerer”, it goes deeper, it’s notable because botw was starkly opposed to the thematic axioms totk presents.

i just think it’s very interesting that they made a sequel to botw, and completely redefined or otherwise ignored botw’s thematic core.

[honourablejester]

I know it’s because there’s something of an actual lineage there, each new setting spun off from or inspired by the ones before, but I find it somewhat amusing that in the current big 3 fantasy ttrpg settings, D&D’s Faerûn, Pathfinder’s Golarion, and Critical Role’s Exandria, the flying cities were always doomed. They’re always there, because flying cities are cool as hell, but they’re always doomed, because we’re not sure if we want that much casual magic in the world. So the Netherese Empire, the Shori Empire, the Age of Arcanum, they’re all lost wonders of the ancient world, the ruins of fallen sky cities serving as fantastic megadungeons littering the landscape of the present day. Once upon a time there was a fantastic mage empire that set their cities flying through the sky, but obviously their hubris and/or a titanic (often divine) enemy brought them down, because such magical luxuries could never be expected to last.

A lot of current fantasy settings are a little bit post-apocalyptic. Explicitly so, in several cases. If you want to play a campaign on a flying city, you have to know in advance that you’re playing a prequel campaign and the city is doomed. Just. As a fact of being. Flying cities don’t last. You just have to live with that fact in the back of your mind.

Don’t get me wrong, the ruins and impact craters of a lost age of flying cities does make a fantastic bit of background worldbuilding. I just, I’d like to see a setting where the golden age isn’t either already gone or slated to end in doom and disaster? A setting with current flying cities. Yeah, maybe some of them have fallen or had isolated disasters, if you’ve got a whole-ass city hanging in the air with only magic holding it up, there’s a lot that can go wrong, but others are still there, they didn’t all die in a single mass catastrophe. You know? A setting where the age of wonder is right now, and it is not divinely mandated to end. We’ve got flying cities, maybe the next stop is space cities, with nothing catastrophic in between. We have all the potential, and the future is bright, and not ironically so, but genuinely so.

Flying cities are cool. They’re a cool thing to explore, and I feel like Tower-of-Babel style hubris-destined-for-a-fall is not the only potential narrative for them. But yes, I’m aware that this is mostly because those three particular settings are a nested egg of inspirations. Heh.

[weirdmageddon]

i posted this on twitter also but it’s still eating at me. i’m so fucking embarrassed to be jewish rn. i dont want to be associated with this ongoing bullshit from israel. why do we need our own state. theyre just making every jew across the globe look bad in general even though many of us are conflicted about zionism and the legitimacy of israel as a state

people have hated jews throughout history for no fuckin reason but now israel exists but now its like. GIVING people reasons to hate us as a group. note that i DON’T conflate zionism with jewishness, but a lot of people in the world don’t know the difference because theyre uninformed and been dripfed cultural antisemitic tropes their whole life and that’s the scary part is them falsely putting two and two together. like what the fuck israel stop youre just putting fuel on the fire for people around the world to hate an entire group of historically persecuted people if youre being this shitty with your insane colonialism and apartheid like……I Want No Fuckin Part Of This. you’re spelling our own doom. you cant just swoop in and go “mine now” and then oppress the people you took land from under a regime without my blood boiling at the injustice no matter WHO you are. even if my lineage is tied to you. so when news outlets support israel it doesn’t feel like they have the best interest of jews as a people in mind. it’s in the interest of a zionist ethnostate and whatever that christian zionism belief is about the jewish people returning to the holy land as prerequisite for the second coming of jesus. its not like they care about us as a dispersed ethnocultural group, it’s all for that religious narrative that a bunch of people in the US are backing.

saying you want all jews to die is antisemitic. beating someone up because they’re jewish and no other reason without knowing their views is antisemitic. criticizing human rights violations perpetrated by israel and the belief that one group deserves more rights another is not antisemitic. and the fact that israel has the ability to pull that antisemitism card in response to criticisms of the violations they commit because their state is the “jewish homeland” drives me fucking insane. take fucking accountability for your actions. and yes, there do exist full-on anti-jewish groups in the middle east that go beyond hatred of israel’s policies and existence as a state and i’m tired of people pretending there aren’t in fear of appearing to seem like they support the state of israel. on the other side of things many people overestimate this by fearmongering and saying EVERY arab is out to get jews worldwide, telling people like me “they want YOU dead”. this is not the belief every person in the middle east and it really rubs me the wrong way that people group millions of individuals into all-encompassing lumps like this. many people there do understand nuance of this political situation.

even if i have that “right of return” by israeli law or whatever, i don’t feel obliged to it; it does not register as fair. why do i have a “right of return” when i’ve never even been there in the first place while palestinians who have homes there can’t return to them? what’s the basis for that? substituting objective reality with an imaginary reality? i don’t think like that. i can hypothetically come and go whenever i please but palestinians are severely limited in mobility? what makes me more entitled to that land than the people who lived there for centuries? nothing that comes from natural law thats for sure. it’s all artificial and inflated.

but at the same time i also dont want to be the target of antisemitism and caught in the fray just for being ethnically jewish. once people start calling for the genocide of entire groups we’ve got issues (and you better believe this absolutely applies to the palestinian victims in gaza too), because people who dissent to the violence perpetrated by the loudest are caught in there with the people who are perpetrating the violence. lack of nuance. people conflating israel and its zionist apartheid policies with jewish ethnicity and culture worldwide. other people conflating being terrorist anti-jew with muslims worldwide (like that 6-year old palestinian-american boy that was just stabbed to death in chicago). scary times man. but as a jew i can’t just opt out of this if it’s how i was born as. i don’t have control over that. but i can control what i think and what my beliefs are

[chex-appreciation-week]

Chex week will be happening from October 13th through the 19th!

And with that, we also get the official announcement of the prompts!

There are no limits or rules to how these can be interpreted. You can go as literal or as artsy or silly as you want with them, the skies the limit!

Day 1: Memory

As they always say: memory is the key. Maybe it’s a simple reflection on the past, maybe it’s the fact that they’re the literal manifestations of someone else’s memories, a reflection of a once great love… or perhaps Church just forgot to close the damn cabinet again.

Day 2: Fluff

Our favorite doomed duo is no stranger to angst and tragedy… so let’s give them a break! Let them enjoy some domestic bliss for once, and spend time in each other’s company without the overbearing burden of being doomed by the narrative. Just this once.

Day 3: Family

These two found their own little family inside of a box canyon, consisting of idiots and morons but they are their idiots and morons… or perhaps you want to go further back in time to when there was just Leonard and Allison and a beautiful baby girl and the future seemed so much brighter… or maybe Church and Tex just adopted a cat

Day 4: AU

Now they’re medieval knights fighting to save the kingdom! Or maybe Church is the super grumpy coffee shop barista with a crush on the cool tattoo artist across the street! Or maybe it’s the same story we all know… but that one moment played out differently… the universes are infinite!

Day 5: Cycle

History repeats itself, time is a flat circle, however, you want to put it there’s no denying the cycle of Leonard Church and Agent Texas. A story destined to be repeated again and again until it finally breaks… or perhaps they’re just teaching Caboose how to ride a bicycle, who knows!

Day 6: Goodbye

Don’t say goodbye… I hate goodbyes… but at the end of the day, you have to let go and say those dreaded words. You have to accept that some people are truly gone. Or sometimes you just don’t get to say those words at all… or maybe… well actually I don’t know how to make this one silly

Day 7: Free Day

Make whatever you like! It can be anything and everything, maybe expand on a previous idea, create a whole new world, or make something sad or silly or soft! This is your day to shine!

As said before any and all content is welcome in this event! Art, fanfic, meta, analysis, playlists, memes etc! If it’s Chex I’ll take it! My only rule is NO AI GENERATED CONTENT!

The tags for this event will be #chex appreciation week and #chex appreciation week 2024

[ftl-faster-than-life]

Okay so. I just tried to send an ask to my drafts and had it promptly evaporate, so while I still remember the gist of your ask, anonymous friend:

You said that you think Mark Waid really likes Hal and Barry, because he has them cameo so often in his World’s Finest book and you said that you would love to see a Hal and Barry centric comic written by Mark and drawn by Dan Mora.

I think Mark Waid definitely favors Hal and Barry. I think he found their stories and their closeness and the tragedy of Barry’s untimely death and Hal’s tragic descent into a destructive spiral really compelling, and that he enjoyed them both as individual characters but especially as a duo in their pre-crisis incarnations. I think you can really see how he’s drawn to the tragedy of them in JLA: Year One and his The Brave and the Bold book, both of which contain a lot of little nods towards the fact that they’re doomed by the narrative.

I agree that it would be amazing to see a Hal and Barry centered story like his World’s Finest—with a heaping helping of Iris and Wally and Carol and Tom, please!—with Dan’s art. I really enjoy how he draws Barry and Hal, I think he does a great job with their body language and expressions. I think about this panel from The Flash: The Fastest Man Alive (2020) #8 a lot. Barry looks so effortlessly relaxed and unthreatened despite being surrounded by characters who are supposed to look physically imposing. Which makes Barry look powerful in his ease, and I absolutely love that.

And of course Mora just draws really pretty people!

I’m really sorry Tumblr ate your ask.

[deathnguts]

Trying to fix the stigma around Bartylus being a ‘one sided’ or ‘toxic’ ship through writing is choosing if you’re going to write Barty to be more wholesome and domestic or write Regulus to be crazier and doomed by his own narrative, which he’s suffocatingly aware and lethargically accepting of and Barty is drowning in the fact that he can’t save him but at least they’re drowning together (until they’re not)

[carniferous]

dil do you have any spare thoughts on jegulus 🤲🏼

jegulus is like a years-long social experiment i keep expecting someone from harvard university to pop out of nowhere and be like Jegulus was a an engineered mass-hallucination for the purpose of seeing if a harry potter yaoi ship between two characters that have never interacted on account of being dead for years at the start of canon could make it to the top 20 most popular ships on ao3

lmao no but in all honesty jegulus is my favorite… if you couldn’t already tell from. the 100k+ words of fanfiction i’ve written about them. they’re the doomed love affair of All time to me. and like… the doomed aspect is very important and compelling to me. not to plug my own fucking fic but this will always be a core part of my jegulus thesis:

He worries that he’ll always wish to be back there, waiting for Regulus’s call. Decades will pass, a lifetime, and the wish won’t fade. He could love a thousand people and nothing will ever compare to the frightening, purposeful way he loved the first time. No one will ever know him so bare and uninhibited as he was at sixteen. The thought scares him so much that he almost throws up again.

it’s the first love and the first end of love that changes you so fundamentally. you can never love like that again bc you’re no longer capable of it. you are a fundamentally different person now bc of that love. it’s this

jegulus is also the love story that wasn’t meant to happen yk? i joke about this all the time but also it’s so serious to me. in a canon setting their love story is always woven through the gaps in the Narrative. they love each other despite the story they’re supposed be living out… and they have no choice but to live that story out! regulus has to take the dark mark. he has to die. james has to marry lily and have harry. he has to die. all in all their love changed nothing about their story but it also changed both of Them so fundamentally. just not in ways that are apparent to anyone but themselves

we also cannot ignore sirius….. sirius!!! sirius might be more important to jegulus than james and regulus themselves. he is the inadvertent crux the accidental catalyst. he would never ever dream of james and regulus falling in love he would actively stop it if he could but he CANNOT bc he’s the reason it happened. regulus and james are only aware of each other’s existence because of sirius. they’re bound to each other by the fact that they cannot separate themselves from sirius.

but i don’t think that james wants to save regulus because he saved sirius. i think james is aware of the fact that he Didn’t save sirius. sirius saved himself. and therefore james understands the differences between regulus and sirius and wants to save regulus himself. he wants to be the white knight rescuing the princess from the tower. he wants to give regulus a better life. and regulus wants that more than anything…. but he doesn’t believe in it. he can’t let himself hope that james is telling the truth bc if he is then it means that Sirius was telling the truth and regulus can’t bear that. it’s this endless misunderstanding……

i think a lot of jegulus fans make the point about how “love isn’t enough to save someone” and while i do think this is a correct statement… the only thing that can save regulus is love. there’s nothing else for him there’s nothing he’s been denied in life except love and connection and if he let himself believe he could have those things…. he could walk out!! james COULD save him!!! love CAN be enough

send me ships/characters !!

[lovingdabeessss]

I have this theory i don’t know if anyone else has come to this conclusion but like

So you all know how Blake and Yang are pretty much confirmed soulmates like reincarnation soulmates

Well I personally have a theory as to why they are

So magic and gods are real here and we all know Ozzy bois there to cause peace and go against his ex girlfriend: SATAN Salem

Well what if the gods created Blake and Yang to constantly remind Oz that he can’t go back to Salem

I in all my little hc’s of this believe that the gods created Yang and Blake’s reincarnations as a result or just in connection to Salem and ozpin cause they’re so clearly paralleled but this is one of my favorite specific versions of it

Cause like he does go back to Salem maybe they’re the result of this

They’re born they grow they fall in love and then they fall apart

Ozpins counterpart will always be the first to die salems will go mad in the aftermath (not always angry violent mad like Salem but maybe throwing themselves off a cliff like the fauna’s princess in the comic’s soulmate story)

This is always the case he can’t stop it it’s destined to happen

I also think that this is fun because Yang doesn’t like ozpin

I think that’s really cool cause it’s a good representation of how he seems to view his own actions or at least how og ozma would view him

Thinking about Oz going through centuries of meeting different variations of two people in love knowing their fate is doomed to become reduced to a lesson to teach him

They probably usually start out good or end up that way eventually so they’re probably on his side often enough so he probably interacts with them often in different lifetimes

And obviously they’re not him and Salem they’re just supposed to represent it

I think it’d be SUPER COOL if Yang and Blake are the first of them to break the cycle because they already went through it

Yang died Blake went crazy then they went to the gods home and now they’re no longer tied to the chains the gods put on them

Idk just a dumb little hc cause I like my ships to be lore relevant

Also I think it fits in with that theme Rwby has with their characters desperately trying to break out of their narratives from the whole destiny thing right down to the fact they’re from the get go given fairy tales to represent and then have to break out of that into their own complexities

[herblay]

Tbf BNHA is and has always been confused messaging-wise. It opens with Deku saying: “humans are not made equal” and showing us all of the foul ways quirkless people are treated. Narratively, this is of course seen as bad, but there’s an underlying principle in the narrative there that’s never actively challenged (and there’s not enough time to make it satisfying if they do) that yes, humans really aren’t born equal. That yes, you see SOME characters overcome their limitations (but even then, like in the case of Deku, it’s because of a big narrative magical moment) but they’re largely confined to the roles expected of them. Power in BNHA is never really given to the powerless, a character like Toga or Shigaraki can’t be saved, and power is never truly denied to those who shouldn’t have it— Endeavor is given a dignity his victims weren’t afforded.

And though I don’t think this is wrong to do in a story in and of itself, I think it is at odds with the way it sets itself up in the opening. The first thing we see in BNHA is everyone telling Deku he can't be a hero with no quirk. The story should be set up to disprove that. To show that his heroic qualities are in and of themselves what makes him a hero. But every time in the narrative where it's his character that makes the difference, he kind of. Fails. He can't save Eri at first, can't save Shigaraki (even though he wants to) because Shigaraki is apparently beyond helping, etc etc. Like the largest successes for him as a hero are explicitly BECAUSE he has One for All now.

And that combined with the way the story ends, with the fact that Toga and Shigaraki are not possible to save, and the only thing about them that was worthy of saving was the innocent child they once were, just feels kind of at odds with what the opening of BNHA sets out to prove in the narrative. BNHA sets itself up to be about how anyone can be a true hero, that true heroism is from character and not power, but the only characters that are capable of being heroes are those with power, the only characters that are able to seek redemption are those whose powers allow that for them. A character like All for One is doomed from the outset, and the narrative makes no foil to him to show that there is a choice to be made there.

Idk it just seems kind of sad to me that a story that superficially claims to be about how anyone can be a hero narratively reinforces the very attitudes the first scenes portray as wrong. And it feels too late to change that. It feels too late for that when Mirio had to get his quirk back to be a hero again. It feels too late for that when Toga is dead. It feels too late for that when Deku was only able to defeat evils with a quirk. It feels too late for that when All for One selected everyone and maneuvered them into position and there was no inherent randomness. It feels too late for this story to course correct into "anyone can be a hero, heroism comes from internal ideals" when it's shown time and time again that the only people who get to be heroes are those with the quirks to do so.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #8 – The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham James

This has been on my tbr for long enough that I entirely forget what originally put it there – the only thing I actually knew going in was that the author was ‘the My Heart is a Chainsaw guy’ (I have not read My Heart is a Chainsaw yet either). Given the genre, that was honestly probably ideal. As was the fact that a blizzard hit a couple days after I started it and I’ve been reading it looking out on a frozen snowscape – it’s very much a winter sort of story.

The story’s told in five parts of wildly varying lengths, each with it’s own endearingly cheesy b-horror movie title and each following a different protagonist. The first four each follow one of a friend group who, as a bunch of fuckup teenagers, trespassed on hunting grounds that were really supposed to be reserved for elders and shot a bunch of elk they had no right to – including a pregnant young cow who was for one reason or another special. Ten years later, the Elk-Headed Woman drags herself back into the world, and begins getting her vengeance for the death of her and her child on each of them (and everyone they care about) in turn.

I have a longstanding opinion that a full-length novel is just too long to sustain a real horror story – by 300 pages things have fairly reliably collapse into urban fantasy or action or farce. The breakup into different parts solves this very well – they’re all very much connected and interwoven, but each feels like its own distinct narrative unit with its own tension and rising action.

And this is very much a horror story in the classic, just barely short of shlocky sense. A trespass against vague but understood sacred laws that leads to horrific and bloody retribution against everyone involved is as close to archtypal horror as you can possibly get, after all. The last section is even focused on a Final Girl! Specifically, it’s a subgenre that I can’t really name but feels very familiar to me – and one I’ve always been a huge fan of, anyway. It’s somewhere downstream of The Count of Monte Cristo, a story where the agent of supernatural doom spends the majority of the story consciously working in the background, manipulating events and exacerbating the protagonist/victim’s flaws to lead them to a contrived but tragic end? Think the netflix Fall of the House of Usher, but like about the exact opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum.

Class is very much something the book cares about. All four protagonists grew up poor on a reservation with little in the way of wealth or opportunity, and by the time they’d turned eighteen all four of them were the kind of young asshole who made life just a little bit worse for everyone around them dealing with the same shit. Ten years latter the three of them who’ve survived that long have gotten over themselves and matured in their own way (and to their own degree), but none of them are exactly flush with cash or living lives of bourgeois respectability (though Lewis comes close). The precarity and only tenuous connections to the society around them just make them better prey for what’s hunting them, of course – in every case, death comes after the (either metaphorical or very viscerally literal) destruction of the few close ties they have, and the only one to survive is also the only one who could really expect people to come rushing to their rescue.

Speaking of close ties the protagonists have – the book’s conception of gender is fascinatingly weird, or at least fascinating in the sense that I’m not at all sure how intentional it is. Of the four main victims, one dies alone at eighteen, and the other three who survive the next ten years are all pretty much explicitly saved (or at least improved and uplifted) by a relationship with a woman who, if not flawless, is basically strictly his moral and practical better. Even the most consistent fuckup of the group has a redeeming feature of being willing to do just about anything for his daughter (despite having lost the chance to really be a big part of her life several times over). With one exception, these women all then die, messily, entirely and explicitly to fuck with and ruin the lives of their men. It’s like someone read Women in Refrigerators and went ‘well there’s an idea...’. It’s blatant enough that I feel like it’s got to be making a deliberate point, but (unless it’s just genre emulation) what the point is does escape me slightly.

Also on the note of stuff I’m quite sure is going over my head at least a bit – basketball! It’s a pretty vital thread running through the entire book, to the point that one of the big set pieces of the final act is literally a basketball game with the monster. Which, like, I watched enough bad anime as a small child to find contrived game-playing under unclear mythic rules with things that really want to kill you instinctively endearing, but I can’t really do anything with this except just point at it.

So as the title might imply, this is a novel that’s concerned with race – all but I believe exactly one character is either is either Blackfeet or Crow, more than half the book takes place on a reservation, and a chunk of the rest is spent having to deal with racist assholes of varying severity. Now, I admit that I have at this point a probably overly cynical view of books that end up on breathless ‘socially conscious horror’ or ‘s/ff from diverse creators you NEED to read’ lists online, but I was still rather pleasantly by how matter-of-factly this was handled? I suppose the best way to put it is that culture, upbringing and racialization deeply inform everyone’s characters, but it never feels like the book is preoccupied with providing some assumed naive and impressionable audience any Important Lessons or provide Good Representation to valourize or emulate? Which is probably just a sign I need to raise and re calibrate my expectations, but.

The monster doesn’t exactly work as, like, a coherent character in terms of her skills and abilities, but as a monster the Elk-Headed Woman is great. But then I love contrived fucked up tragedies and am a longstanding partisan of Spooky Deer Horror, so I suppose I would say that.

So yeah, fun read!

[dumbass-duo-showdown]

DUMBASS DUO SHOWDOWN ROUND 1 BATTLE 4

burton guster & shawn spencer (PSYCH) vs Rosencrantz & Guildenstern (Hamlet + Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are dead)

PROPAGANDA UNDER THE CUT

Gus & Shawn

They’ve been friends canonically since at least 3 years old and at the start of the show they’re I wanna say 30 maybe? And yet these two grown men are THE most chaotic idiots (affectionate) in the whole show (and let’s be real anywhere). The entire show in fact hinges on the idea that they’re dumbasses and WILL get into carat shenanigans. Episode examples include the one where they are investigating an alien abduction, the one where they’re looking for big foot, the vampire one, all of these by the way they hundred percent believe to be true until they themselves unwillingly prove otherwise. And maybe the most dumbass moment of all time, when Gus finds his boss dead and instead of calling the cops he gets his dna ALL OVER THE CRIME SCENE, calls Shane to help clean up and Shawn gets HIS DNA ALL OVER THE CRIME SCENE AS WELL!!!! Truly cannot think of a worse reaction to finding a dead body. They’ve been sucking that single brain cell that exists between them dry for over 3 decades now and they show no signs of stopping.

they are such idiots (affectionate) and they can't live without each other

they are. so stupid. both of them can be smart in their own ways but when you put them together the dumb best friends energy is unmatched. they are platonic soulmates pretending that shawn has psychic powers and solve crimes by dicking around and somehow always coming out alive. they accidentally befriend the criminals they’re supposed to be investigating constantly. they’re always one step away from being fired or arrested bc of their dumbassery

the entire show is literally shawn pretending to be a psychic (← dumbass behavior) and gus aiding and abetting him and actively a dumbass as well

If you have seen even a single episode of this show, you know these two fools are the best duo ever. Constantly bantering theough 80s movie references and animal like noises, most often above a dead body, these two bring unique different dummy energy that both brings each other up and builds up their own skills along the way. I will love these two men until the day I die and they deserve an honest chance to be the best dumbass duo of all time!

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern

They have no clue what’s going on and keep trying to figure it out but they keep missing the clues. Rosencrantz keeps echoing Guildenstern (He’s only good in support). They completely miss that they are characters in a tragedy and doomed by the narrative

The OG dumbass duo. Like....these two share one braincel and usually Guildenstern holds it but that makes them none the cleverer.

they literally had a second play written by another person that expanded upon their dumbassery

so like first of all they are one unit. second of all they have silly recorder-related shenaningans. third of all they're doomed by the narrative but they're silly enough to make being doomed by the narrative fun and entertaining