#corpse warning

[scorchrend]

how do i even tag this

[badly-drawn-doflamingo]

I keep on thinking about Sengoku's reaction to taxidermy Corazon.

agony, father

( @r0ttkins Sengoku )

[starsandwriting]

Me listening to magp 8: What a fascinating spin on a Lonely statement that asks what if it was the Place that was lonely, so hungry that it desires to quite literally ea- WHAT THE FUCK WHAT THE FUCKKKKKK WHAT WHAT WHAT THE FUCKKK WHATTTTTT FUCKING WHAT WHAT COME AGAIN HUH WHAT FUCKING WH

[ID: Cartoony art of people who look comically shocked, terrified, and overwhelmed, with their eyes bugging out and their mouth open, sweating in shock and trembling. End ID]

[Plain text: Multiple variations of "What the fuck" and "come again" written in caps lock. End PT]

[Thank you to @princess-of-purple-prose and @ryutarotakedown for the id's :] I hope it's ok to merge the two!]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Welcome to the Dungeons of Fear and Hunger.

[saturdaynightspecialpresentation]

Poor Things

First of all, Emma Stone’s performance is as good as everybody is saying. Stone takes a very difficult role that easily could have gone very, very wrong and makes it look like the most effortless thing in the world.

I have been looking at the reviews, good and bad, and I think that the minority of people who didn’t vibe with this movie had slightly skewed expectations.

Poor Things starts out at Tetsuo The Iron Man levels of fucked up, but by the end it has dropped to Edward Scissor hands levels of fucked up. This is probably plenty of weirdness for the average movie-goer, but true connoisseurs of mondo cinema should calibrate their expectations.

Second, apparently this is being talked up as a sort of feminist coming of age fable chronicling an everywoman’s sexual awakening and liberation, and it really isn’t that, and I think if you are hoping for that you’ll come away disappointed.

Better, I think, to look at it as an autistic coming of age fable and power fantasy, which I think it does a tremendous job at.

Very minor spoilers under the cut; really, this is more an essay about what I thought the film was about than a review, my review would be that it's somehow simultaneously a feel-good crowd-pleaser AND a movie where an adult woman with the brain of a toddler stabs the eyes out of a corpse with a scalpel and then plays with its penis (I wasn't kidding with the Tetsuo comparison)

Honestly now that I've actually written that out I have maybe underestimated how impressive it is that Yorgos Lanthimos made a movie where that happens on screen but somehow basically everybody loves the movie.

In terms of sex, we do watch Bella discover sex, but she very quickly comes to a conclusion about her relationship with it which never once changes throughout the rest of the movie:

She likes it, she likes it more with an attractive partner, she is utterly lacking in any kind of sexual jealousy, and she doesn't attach too much more to it than that.

This is an odd comparison, but Bella treats sex the way Joey did on Friends. A man acting this way is a sitcom cliche, but a woman acting the same way…

This is a film that is really, really not interested in the real-world consequences of this kind of sex; in fact, given that a pregnancy is the inciting incident of the film, it came off a little weird to me that the possibility of a pregnancy or STD was never really addressed (unless there was a line or two that I missed while I was in the bathroom).

For the most part, though, I was able to get past it by just thinking of it as a heightened world. The sets and settings are extremely artificial, and ultimately I figured, “Hey, if I can buy this kind of thing as harmless and fun in a sitcom, I can buy it in this other kind of heightened reality.

I will say, I don't think Bella is meant to be an every-woman, and that there's textual support for this in the film itself.

All of the women Bella deals with in some way question her approach to sex, making it clear, sometimes through explicit dialog, other times more reading between the lines, that her approach to sex is not for them.

If there’s any particularly feminist message in the film, it’s that when confronted with Bella’s bizarre approach to the world, none of the women get angry at her, and most of the men she meets do.

But Bella’s relationships with other women aren’t really the meat of the film, that’s more about her relationship with men, and particularly the way that they feel, deep in their bones, that they should have control over any woman that they have sex with.

Duncan Wedderburn, when he first discovers Bella and convinces her to go away with him, thinks he is tricking and seducing a beautiful naif who he can use and then discard when he tires of her. Their relationship disintegrates as it becomes clear that Bella hasn’t been tricked at all; she wanted exactly what he was able to give, a chance to sow her wild oats by having some no strings attached sex with an attractive, likable person in an exciting foreign city.

This makes Wedderburn increasingly unhappy and unhinged (He says at one point that he has become what he hates, a “grasping succubus”) much to Bella’s growing consternation. She has no idea why he can’t simply be happy having sex with her and otherwise letting her do what she wants, and he is so committed to a certain vision of gender roles that he can’t even begin to explain it, he can only lash out in frustration.

And that I think is the meatier part of the film; Bella doesn’t so much flout social expectations as she is simply totally unaware that they exist. 

Honestly I think the character isn’t so much coded as autistic as she just is autistic. Bella is a woman who is basically totally unaware of social expectations and constantly taken aback to discover that they exist.

More than that, she has to figure out a way to work around the fact that many of the people who become most enraged by her are also so totally lacking in self-reflection, and view their social situation as so normal, so self-evidently obvious that they cannot explain to her why it is she has made them angry. They suddenly fly into rages that clearly perplex Bella and which they themselves don’t even bother to explain, because they regard their own ideas as self-evident.

Bella is an idealized autistic hero; personally as outlandish as she is I don’t really think the film expects us to take the side of anybody else, and I think there are some fairly subtle and accurate bits of autistic behavior on her part.

She responds to life as a kind of social experiment, attempting to parse out a set of logical rules and, especially in the latter parts of the movie, she often justifies her actions with a perfectly sensible internal logic that the emotional men in her life can’t parse out. Late in the film, when she and Wedderburn are destitute, she prostitutes herself for 30 francs, and with implacable logic, explains the two reasons that Wedderburn ought to be quite happy she has done so: First, her john was much worse at sex than Wedderburn, which ought to satisfy his ego, and second, they now have 30 francs and the potential to earn more.

Wedderburn does not appreciate her logical approach.

Another thing that strikes me as very true is that Bella has a very odd theory of mind for other people. There’s a scene where, traumatized by the unspeakable poverty and suffering she sees in Alexandria, she puts all of Wedderburn’s money in a box and rushes out to give it to the poor. Unfortunately the ship is leaving, but two port attendants tell her that they will be staying on the island, and would be happy to deliver a package. She tells them that she has a big box filled with money and they should give it to the island’s poor, and they agree to do so. Now, the film never tells us one way or another whether they keep their word; but Bella herself retains an iron certainty that they did exactly what she asked them to. Now, we know Bella understands what lying and deceit are, because we’ve seen her trick people before, like when she chloroforms McCandles to run away with Wedderburn. But it never once occurs to her that these sailors might do something similar. Call it paradoxical, but that kind of thinking is common in autistic people.

There’s also the scene where the self-professed cynic Harry Astley shows her the suffering in Alexandria; he admits, when he sees how terribly it has affected her, that he didn’t tell her simply because he thought it was the truth of the world, but that her attitude made him angry, and he wanted to hurt her. A very common part of the autistic coming of age is the slow realization that not everything people tell you is part of a dispassionate, scientific search for the truth.

There’s also a scene in a whorehouse in which Bella argues that it would make more sense to have the women decide who is to sleep with the johns, so that then the john could be more confident that the girl was attracted to him, which he must doubt if he chooses. You can tell I’m autistic because I immediately had the thought, “Well, but the johns would probably be worried that nobody would choose them.”

One of Bella’s fellow working girls instead tells her, “Some of them like the fact that we don’t have a choice”.

[ayyy-imma-ninja]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Is this the part where you interrogate me again?” he asks you. There’s amusement in his tone, yet his posture tells you he’s willing to comply. You nod, and he clicks his nonexistent tongue. “Boo~ And here I thought you missed me~”

You fight the corners of your mouth from rising as you give a roll of your eyes. “Standard procedure,” you tell him, plucking your handy notepad and pen from your coat pocket. “Just like last time.”

“Is it not procedure to do this at the station?” 

“That is the usual place, yes,” you say, giving your pen life as you swirl circles in the corner of the page to get ink flowing, “for officers to maintain control and ensure the safety of others.” You lift your eyes to him. “As someone who is qualified to do both, I trust you’ll keep yourself composed?”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

illustrations for chapter 4 below cut (tw for the first one, "blood")

[staravia]

corpse party, 2021 edition

[literallyjusttoa]

Left this abandoned in the drafts (which is a bit ironic) but it's a spin on this post, where instead of Apollo just being locked in some room on Olympus somewhere, he's bound to the ruins of an abandoned Ancient Greek city. Maybe somewhere near Delphi, maybe Troy, idk.

[teleport-warning]

Draw this in your style prompt from Pakhnokh!

[meeks-just-wants-to-scroll]

“What if we make two men who hate each other and an unfortunate rich boy travel across the RDR2 map while avoiding an apocalypse-level monster invasion?” - Doeiika, at some point.

Go read The World by @doeiika / SourApplechips on AO3.

Under the cut is art involving blood / gore… also a brief reference to Blood Under The Snow by Amras.

To be the protagonist is to be changed (physically and or mentally).

[ghostlyarchaeologist]

"Mark my words! Somebody here is the killer. No one is leaving until we find out who!"

Leverage S04E02 The 10 Li'l Grifters Job.

[luck-of-the-drawings]

been followin slimes POV of the qsmp since it started but mMY GOOOODDDDD i never expected to fall so in love with it... I LOVE THE TRADGEDY OF A COMEDIC CHARACTER! so funny so silly, who could ever take him seriously? when the reaction to grief can be so overblown and strange, its hard not to laugh! because wheres the line, really? we're just here to have fun! i look forward to the day this guy snaps! its gonna be REALLY FUNNY i tell ya hwat!!!

(CREDIT TO A COMIC I REFERENCED UNDER THE CUT)

something about this comic makes me so so emotional, and its so well framed. to discover something by the end of a comic, to follow the same line of thought as a character within a drawing, to either come to the same conclusion, or the dramatic irony of figuring it out first. it was made by the talented Lynda Barry, and she has a wonderful shop here https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/greatest-marlys/

[aziraphales-library]

Hi! I’m looking this fic I probably read maybe 2 years ago. It was a corpse bride au of the good omens characters. Crowley was the corpse bride and Aziraphale was Victor but I’m pretty sure they were both women in this. The biggest change was also that they ended up together at the end of the fic. It’s very likely I would have read this on AO3 but now I can’t find it anywhere. Any help is appreciated! <3

Mind the tags, but I believe you're after...

The (After)life of the Party by CloseToSomethingReal (T)

Reciting her vows shouldn't have been so difficult for Aziraphale. They were just a couple of sentences, a promise to her fiance, Gabriel Malachi. But when she's sent out to practice in the garden, she does manage to say them. Only not to Gabriel. To a lovely Corpse Bride, with flaming red hair, and strange eyes, who drags Aziraphale to the underworld with her, declaring them newlyweds.

A little tip for anyone looking for a fic with something niche enough that it's actually going to be really easy to find: use the "search within results" box in the filters tab. It searches the tags, summary, and I believe notes of all the fics. So whether a fic is or is not tagged for what you're looking for, if the author has mentioned it or you remember part of the summary, you can search for it. This fic took seconds to find!

- Mod D

[anxiety-elemental-kay]

Slowly making my way through volume 10 (I'M NOT READY NOOOOO) and I have two quick things from chapter 3.

This Vash panel after telling Melanie and the kids to run inside is SO CUTE. Look at him. "Oh yeah the feathers. Yeah. Uh. It's cool I'm Nick's friend."

(especially after his powers manifesting against his will and shown to be horrifying until now, it's fun to see them in a cute panel. more thoughts on this later.)

And finally:

DING DONG THE BITCH IS DEAD

[crazymecjc]

vashwood week day two- names

[gachamanswhore]

tell me that you love me, I know all your talk is cheap

x