#even if that person is fictional even within the context of the story itself

[supercantaloupe]

there was this trend in 2010s musicals (especially those popular with/aimed at teens) to have a character be haunted by the ghost of another deceased character, wherein that ghost walks around and talks and interacts with the protagonist as if they were a normal person but they are (relatively) explicitly Not Real within the larger diegesis and cannot be perceived by other characters or interact directly with the world themselves. think connor in dear evan hansen, heather chandler in (the latter two thirds of) heathers, gabe in next to normal. (by a stretch of the imagination i think you could consider the squip in be more chill as fulfilling a similar role).

anyway not to 2017 broadway fandomize a 200 year old opera, but that with the don and leporello. like obviously an abuser like the don would have a lasting impact on an abuse victim like leporello psychologically and socially for a long time (perhaps ever). but now i'm imagining the don literally following leporello around for years, possibly for the rest of his life, haunting him. both fully aware the don's dead and not real and can't control anything anymore of course but still present in leporello's life and mind, walking about and talking but audible and visible to no one else, inseparable and inescapable

[howtofightwrite]

I love picking at plot holes like scabs so i want my fight scenes to be as realistic as possible. However. There’s a creature in my head that says a buster sword is SICK AS HELL. What modifications would it need to be even remotely wieldable while still keeping its central appeal (huge sword big blade cool and sexy) intact?

You’ve made a mistake. You mistook suspension of disbelief for realism. This is a common problem that gets in the way of a lot of fantasy and sci-fi authors. So, don’t worry. It isn’t just you. However, realism vs believability is where your hangup is. Stories don’t need to be realistic to be believable.

The quick and dirty (and possibly unhelpful) answer is to create a world that justifies your buster sword, not a buster sword that’s trying to justify itself in a world that doesn’t want it. You step back from the sword itself and away from a world where reality dictates that it’s too heavy, too clumsy, too slow, and ask yourself: “in what type of world does this thing make sense?” And there’s about a billion different ways to create that.

The hangup with the realistic argument is that all of fiction is a lie. Good or bad, that’s what stories are. They can be very compelling, addicting, manipulative, feel incredibly good, and still be fake. The goal of a creator isn’t just to create stories that are believable, but for your audience to want to believe in them. Storytelling is always a joint venture between you and your reader. You are the salesperson asking your audience to come along for the ride. To keep their attention, you’ve got to spin up a good yarn. Build trust. The world has to feel right, but it doesn’t have to be right. Reasonable, not right. The goal is to take a cool idea and work backwards to how your society got here so that when seen from an outside perspective, the choice ultimately looks like a reasonable conclusion given the surrounding context. One of the better ways to build your reasonable conclusions is by studying the history of technological invention from the beginning to the midpoint rather than starting with the end point—the results.

History is full of weird, wacky, wild attempts and failures at creation. You’re not the first person to look at a human sized sword and wonder if it could, in fact, hit good. Or, really, better than swords that currently exist. Or, fulfill a battlefield role the sword was currently not occupying. Or, as we like to say, have real battlefield applications. The Claymore, the Zwhihander, the Zhanmadao are all real weapons that saw real, if not necessarily extensive, use. Like all weapons, they were specialized tools meant for particular battlefield uses. In this case, mainly as anti-cavalry support.

Ask yourself, why? Not just, why would I want it? Ask, why would I use it?

What actual purpose does the big cool blade serve beyond looking big and cool? What function does it fill on the battlefield? Why use the big cool blade instead of other weapons? What does it do better? What are some offsets which might account for the massive size? Technology? Superhuman enhancements, mystical or otherwise? Gravitic fields? Magic? Why is the big cool blade better suited to ensuring a character’s survival? What advantages does it provide? What is its practical value to warriors within your setting?

The initial defensive reaction is that we don’t need a reason because we have the Rule of Cool. That could be the reason, but I challenge you to go deeper. Go deeper than, “this was the weapon my character was trained to use.” The followup question is: why were they trained to use it?

In the real world, we can answer these questions both from a personal and from a larger social perspective. We may not be able to answer whether we’d use a gun, but we understand why humanity developed guns, why we use guns, and the purpose they serve both for personal protection and in their military applications. The answers don’t necessarily need to be good or smart. What matters is that an answer exists to feed your audience. When your reader starts struggling to believe, they begin to ask questions, they pick at the fabric of the narrative trying to figure out why their mind has rejected the story they were previously enjoying. What we, the writer, want to create is a chain of logic underpinning the narrative and its world. This way, when questions are asked, a reasonable answer is ready and waiting. While we won’t win over everyone, trust that your audience wants to believe. Trust that they’re smart enough to figure it out without being spoon fed. That way, you won’t fall into the trap of infodumping.

Worldbuilding always involves a lot more happening under the surface than ever makes it onto the page. Your characters will be the ones to demonstrate and act on the internal logic that’s been created for them without needing a billion questions to lead us from Point A to Point B.

If we look at human history in a wide view, we find that weapons are a fairly steady march forward that matches a civilization’s technological growth. We keep what works and discards what doesn’t. The crossbow replaced the bow as the main form of artillery in martial combat, but we still kept the bow. The bow still had practical applications. Guns eventually replaced the crossbow just like they replaced the sword, but it actually took a very long time. We had functional firearms in the Middle Ages.

Ease of Use

Ease of Training

Lethality

From a military standpoint, these are the three most important aspects for widespread adoption of any weapon. Easy to use. Easy to train. Lethal. The longer it takes to train a soldier on a weapon the more time your army is losing out on using that soldier and the more effective the weapon needs to be in order to justify its expense. Why give your soldier a big cool sword if they’ll never get close enough to reach the forward line to make the assault? Why have them use the big cool sword if operating the laser cannon is more efficient, effective, and keeps them alive longer? In the coldness of battlefield calculus, it’s often better to have cheap, efficient units rather than more expensive ones that might be more lethal but take longer to produce. No matter how good they are, you’re eventually going to lose them. Therefore, easy replaceability becomes a factor.

If you can answer those questions (and the myriad of other similar ones) you won’t just have a weapon, you’ll have a world. You’ll have more than a justification, you’ll have battlefield strategy, tactics, and a greater understanding of how the average layman characters in your setting beyond your main character approach warfare and possibly a technological history. You might even have several functional armies.

Ultimately, this is a game of value versus cost. Most settings that use big cool swords sacrifice ease of use and ease of training to amp up lethality. The weapon having a specialized function or only being usable by a specialized unit helps if that unit’s battlefield effectiveness is justified. Or, you could just have a weird technological outlier where its effectiveness doesn’t quite justify its cost even if the individual warrior is effective. A good example of this is in shounen anime where one character has a specialty that no one else has, a really cool, effective weapon that never appears anywhere else, because the length of training, high skill floor, and finicky nature of its use make it difficult to justify widespread adoption.

The danger is assuming there’s a right answer. There isn’t one. The value in learning the rules of real world violence is so you can break them. This way you can tell the difference between the vital rules necessary for suspending disbelief and don’t accidentally break the ones you needed to keep your audience invested.

-Michi

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[batbeato]

Thinking more about Umineko and its fictional nature: in and of itself, the body of works that we read in the visual novel (the message bottles and the subsequent forgeries) are creating a manufactured, imagined historical event just as much as they are both documentation of real people (the Ushiromiya family) and fictional stories with fictional characters based on true events and people.

The message bottles are a sort of autobiographical and yet speculative fiction, while every forgery is akin to a sort of historical fiction with an undeniable autobiographical event. True history blurs together with the fictional nature of the medium through which it is being told (a highly dramatized, metaphorical story, written more to grapple with oneself and one's history than to recount any sort of 'true story').

We are never even privy to primary sources: we only hear about the best primary source, Eva, from Ange and Okonogi's discussion of her in Episode 4. They discuss the facts known (the deaths of the rest of the family, her presence in Kuwadorian, her having the Head's ring) and her story (that she is innocent). Her story is primarily just her denying culpability: it is not sharing much more than that. Even her diary, which is discussed at length in Episode 8, is never exposed to the public, and it is only in the manga adaptation that its contents are revealed.

So, in the original Umineko, the entirety of the Rokkenjima Incident is one grand historical fiction, in much the same way as people write stories about the Titanic. Of course, people often relate the Witch Hunter community within the story to true crime enthusiasts. But I cannot help but wonder if it also bears similarity to those who become obsessed with historical tragedies, imposing fictional characters onto real people who died or creating fictional characters to die within that tragedy. People are obsessed with forgeries not merely for the true crime of it - for the speculation of the unsolved mystery - but for the sheer enjoyment of, over and over, watching bloodshed. The fictional past, made familiar by being known entirely through a textual context and projected onto by so many witch enthusiasts, becomes a stage upon which they make the characters act out the tragedy over and over. This is why the character of Black Battler exists: the duality of a person who could never have been the culprit, who is made the culprit regardless not merely because of the plausibility of any theory but because people desire a large volume of stories depicting him as such for the sheer enjoyment of the story.

Erika creates a false imagined past for Natsuhi in Episode 5, not out of any love for historical fact but for her 'love' of the created past she has given Natsuhi. And in this past, there is no room for the facts. She creates bodies of work and even uses a primary source - Natsuhi's diary - to support her story. And because there is nothing to deny her false past - Natsuhi is dead - she is able to do so. It is only when a survivor, Battler, speaks up that Erika's false past is defeated.

But the solution Umineko offers is not to open up Eva's diary, not to give a new primary source. In opening her diary, people would only use it to further desecrate the past, rather than using it to acknowledge the reality in an empathetic way. It is by closing the diary, by putting away the need to obsess over past tragedies, and by instead committing to the future (Yukari's orphanage) that tragedies will be averted.

[doomsdaydicecascader]

wow you’re the first person i’ve seen actually support the retcon, that’s cool

i’ve always been neutral on it but would you be down with explaining your opinions on the retcon?

so my number one feeling is that the way homestuck is most like a game is not in its framing or its many subsystems within itself, but in that homestuck is a challenge to the reader first and foremost. it challenges a lot of existing preconceptions about what stories are, what stories can be.

sometimes this is in some stupid ways, but a lot of the time, it's in very palateable ways. hussie describes stuff like the juxtaposition of the earthbound walksprite panels and hussnasty mode as a "creative power move", something that keeps readers on their toes, something which kind of prods at your expectations and why you have those expectations.

and it helps to ask, what challenge is homestuck presenting to me, the reader, by doing this. this is the repeated motion of homestuck, like. "oh, what, it's insane that there's a whole playable game", "oh, what, it's insane that the fallout and consequences of an entire session of the game is being given in just three walkarounds". rose's arc is a challenge to the idea of a "coming of age" story, how do you come of age into a world where the metrics for growth and maturity and adulthood are denied to you? what if "adulthood" and "maturity" were fake ideas all along? well, if nothing matters, maybe you should have a drink to rest your mind about it.

one of the most direct challenges is the challenge of what death means in a story - there are a lot of stories where death is a bad end for a character. an impactful enough character death can change culture around itself for as long as it remains relevant. but that's not what death is in homestuck. death in homestuck is the freedom from being in homestuck. this is most prevalent with its deployment of gnostic ideas - yaldabaoth's treasure being homestuck itself expresses this most directly. the creator has made a flawed world and encourages the suffering of its inhabitants.

death is freedom from this flawed world, and this is expressed in terezi: remem8er. characters who did terrible things, horrible things, unforgiveable things, can find peace in death.

and i think the retcon is far and away the headiest challenge, the final boss of storytelling in homestuck's terms, because it directly challenges the idea of continuity, which is, by the way, TOTALLY FAKE.

continuity isnt actually real, its a thing youre actively constructing as you read. the drawings, the words, the music, the animation, the gameplay - all these things can help shape the idea of art, but the art itself, that's produced by you, the reader. and i think this is a good time to switch over to talking about the never-ending story for a moment.

the never-ending story is a story about atreyu. he goes on a fantasy quest, one which involves the death of his beloved steed artax, the plight of the world of fantasia, and confrontations with the nothing, this devouring force which threatens to end it. and ultimately, he loses. the forces of the nothing are just too overwhelming for a fictional character to overcome. the stakes are too high, no ending could be satisfactory and not contrived.

but then he doesn't lose.

because the never-ending story, the movie, is about bastian, and the relationship and empathy he builds with atreyu as he follows him on his adventure, and bastian, as the reader, is capable of caring about atreyu and fantasia even as it's been reduced to nothing. and its bastian caring about it, and bringing his own context, his own experiences - the name of his dead mother - to the story, that allows it to be reborn as something that can be completed.

and then he rides on the big luck dragon falkor and barfs on the bullies from the start of the movie.

homestuck is doing the same thing, but filtered through the language of video games. if youre playing ff9 and lose to black waltz #3 or whatever, it's a video game, that's to be expected. just do better next time. you wiped on the trial, it's normal, regroup and pull again. youve got 90 minutes. and in that time, in that regression, you become the kind of person who could overcome that challenge.

and it's a powerful challenge! it's one most readers don't overcome, because they are still stuck in the terms of thinking about things in what they expect out of it, instead of what it is. and this is kind of the core idea of homestuck.

hussie put it the best themself:

Homestuck, as an examination of all forms of creative practice, whether cosmic or artistic, isolates the tension between perfect, celebrated idealization and specific, flawed instantiation. The purity of the ideal is what's initially sought, but the imperfection of the specific is what has true value. Conflict and suffering arise from the guilt and stress associated with overvaluing the former. Deliverance and humanity come from recognizing and embracing the latter.

and honestly, i like what the retcon does for basically all the characters it changes dramatically. people take issue with rose's alcoholism plotline being resolved with vriska_slap.png but i don't really, because rose's alcoholism isn't like, of itself if that makes sense. it's alcoholism as an extension of nihilism, in a way that doesn't reflect real alcoholism, but it doesn't have to. s'a story. things can mean things nonliterally.

and vriska regresses as a character, but i think this specific regression is the core of homestuck. you get the platonic ideal of vriska-ness, one who didn't see and feel the trauma she inflicted on tavros, one who has completely supplanted gamzee's role as the plot-mover guide in the alpha session. and one who only makes token gestures at reparations and atonement for her misdeeds. one who is still obsessed with being at the center. and between 2016 and 2019, i was so certain that she had died a heroic death in act 7 that it is an immovable core plot point of my own comic.

(homework: why would homestuck call act 7 the rapture?)

and like, those pre-retcon characters literally do still exist, they show up in remem8er. remem8er goes unbelievably hard on giving every single dead character in the comic the best catharsis available to them: deliverance from having to be in homestuck. and i mean that entirely sincerely! the best ending for a homestuck character is not being in homestuck. and that's a tough thing for people to get their minds around.

but again, it kind of comes naturally with taking homestuck as it is, and thinking intently about what it's doing, what conventions it's challenging and how it's challenging them. because sometimes it's deeply stupid (decade-plus of thought on the matter has not made the incest any more palateable or understandable)

but sometimes it's the best shit in the whole world

[altocat]

What do you think Sephiroth had to do to be good, assuming he couldn't simply quit ShinRa, him staying meant he had to kill his friends who deserted and him deserting meant he had to kill his friends who stayed with ShinRa and were sent to eliminate him? And Rufus was itching for a new war in Wutai?

I mean obviously, the same thing Rosen and Angeal did, but other than that?

I think "goodness", at least in the context of fiction and not reality, is a more morally gray concept in the world of FFVII. Sephiroth kills people under Shinra. But it's not personal. It's not because he takes pleasure in the act of killing. Even our heroes kill people. And there's a lot to be said about the real world ethics of people who kill in the line of duty when at war or under orders, which is honestly subjective. Whether you view people who kill under orders as "good" or "bad" is honestly up to the individual. You could certainly make a case for either side of the debate.

So with that said, I personally believe that while Sephiroth's actions were inherently awful under Shinra, within the moral framework of the universe and story, he's still a somewhat decent person. "Good", but because I can separate his morality as a singular entity from the actions he's forced to take. A person who has likely committed several atrocities, but is mainly a product of an environment in which he has no real agency. Angeal and Genesis are also in there, but to lesser degrees. Glenn and Zack below them. All of these characters are "bad" in theory for their actions under Shinra. But they WANT to be "good" and are shown to at the very least be capable of great kindness or potential. Some of them even die because of it. And when your in-universe moral afterlife features the same endgame for everyone, then yeah. You can be lenient. I think the lines would blur way more significantly if they were real people, but they're not. They're fictional characters. So the viewer can choose to engage with their shaky morality on a more personal level that leaves room for empathy.

SO with all that rambling out of the way, I do think Sephiroth had options. He could have retired. He could have bided his time and waited for the organization to eat itself. He could have joined Genesis under the pretense of "helping" him while actively collaborating with Zack. And he honestly could have just booked it out of there. He's strong enough to where he could at the very least held Shinra off for a time, grueling and exhausting though it would have been. There are parts of the globe that Shinra still hasn't gotten its hooks in. There was what was left of Glenn's team. And Avalanche. Sephiroth had OPTIONS, there were just various factors that delayed his decision. Sephiroth was still in the process of fully questioning his role under Shinra. And just as he's about to commit to an idea the Nibelheim Incident coincidentally takes place, likely thanks Hojo's manipulations. It was bad timing all around. The worst possible circumstance at the worst possible time.

[amateurvoltaire]

In one of your last posts you mentioned you were studying the civil war in Vandée. Have you ever seen the rather new movie "Vaincre ou Mourir" on the topic? If yes, what do you think of it? I was very curious to give it a try, hoping it's not the usual demonisation of the revolutionary government. Not that I expect it to be portrayed positively in a movie focused on the Vendéean insurgents pov, of course...

Thanks a lot for your question! It’s the first one I've ever received, and I’m really excited to dive into it. (I might have gone a bit overboard, so grab a coffee or a drink before you tackle this beast… TLDR at the bottom…)

I watched "Vaincre ou Mourir" a couple of months ago. Before I dive into my thoughts, the man himself would like a word:

All jokes aside, have you ever been to one of those medieval theme parks where they offer a "realistic" medieval show with dinner? As a kid, every summer, my parents took me to a jousting show at an Italian theme park. We'd watch two knights fight each other for an hour while being “medieval” and munching on chicken legs without any cutlery.

That's pretty much how I felt watching this movie: it’s flashy and fun but doesn’t have much going on underneath. It makes more sense when you discover that the film was funded by Puy du Feu, a large historical theme park in Vendée.

The context

And this is the thing: despite the Canal+ distribution, most of the production is local. The Vendée itself is often defined as a memory space (1), which can lead to a community feeling a special connection to their past. This is often reflected in local traditions, commemorations, and even political leanings. I remember watching an interview from the bicentenary where some locals said they don’t celebrate the 14th of July as a matter of principle—200 years later!

It’s also worth noting that the Vendée has a history of conservative and right-leaning political preferences, and Canal+ is also a right-leaning media outlet.

The Experts

Is it a documentary? Is it a fictional film? It's hard to say in the first few minutes.

The movie attempts to project historical accuracy by introducing four experts right at the start. If a film opens with such a direct appeal to authority, I tend to scrutinise who these experts are. So, who are they?

Reynald Secher: a historian who has been a massive proponent of the Vandean genocide theory. He is very anti-Republican, and his research methodologies are rather sketchy…

Nicolas Delahaye: I don’t know much about him, but I see he publishes primarily regionally in a Vendean publishing house. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s particularly biased, but it does mean his audience is very limited to people with specific views.

Anne Rolland-Boulestreau: a historian at the Université Catholique de l’Ouest specialising in the Vendée counter-revolution. Her articles in the Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française seem unbiased and well-researched. I own one of her books but haven't read it yet, so I can't speak to her longer-form content.

Armand Bernand: if you google de la Rochejaquelein, you will find this guy everywhere. He owns a publishing house, loves the Château de la Durbelière (2), and wrote a series of books set there. He clearly has a historical crush on M. Henri. I think he cosplayed him during some re-enactments and wrote a book about Henri’s brother Auguste.

It’s worth mentioning they either hail from Vendée or work exclusively within the region. This is my bias speaking because I’ve pretty much read all his work, but if you make a movie about the Vendee and can’t get Jean-Clément Martin to say something on camera about it, you should probably not feature any experts…

The Story

After an awkward three minutes of experts telling us how important the revolution was and introducing Charette, we get to the actual movie, which opens with a pile of bodies, burnings, a hanged person, and an awkward first-person voiceover of Charette saying that they made the Vendee into an inferno. This will be a theme for the next hour or so.

If I were to describe this film in two words, "tragedy porn" would fit. What occurred in Vendée was horrific, and its rightly violent portrayal should help viewers understand and appreciate the human and historical impact. However, the film often prioritises shock value over explaining the underlying reasons.

Charette is, by all accounts, a very compelling subject. The guy was a libertine with bucket-loads of courage and style who had a woman as an aide de camp in 1793! Despite spending 1.5 hours with him, narrated from his perspective, I would be hard-pressed to tell you what he’s actually fighting for. Is it honour? Is it revenge? Is it stubbornness? Your guess is as good as mine!

There is absolutely no character growth whatsoever. The film presents as a sequence of battles and shocking scenes narrated by a somewhat detached Charette. Remember what I said about the medieval show? This shock-value approach might work for a short performance during dinner but falls flat when stretched across an entire film.

Despite the weak script, the actors are quite good. Nothing Oscar-worthy, but they can act. The guy that plays Charette does a very good job and is quite charismatic.

The Historical Accuracy

On the whole, I can’t see glaring historical errors. It is fairly historically accurate with some minor issues. This is obviously not an exhaustive list, but there are things I noticed and jotted down:

The main one is the bizarre theory that Charette agreed to the peace of 1795 because he was promised that Louis XVII would be handed to him. This has absolutely no credible historical basis whatsoever. It’s a myth that has been propagated for over 200 years.

I’m pretty sure Charette didn’t sign the treaty of La Jaunaye. In fact, as far as I remember, no one from the insurgent side signed it.

While not a historical inaccuracy per se, it's a missed opportunity that the film often portrays Charette as the sole leader of the Vendean army. Though he mentions being one chief among many, this aspect is quickly glossed over. His historical relationship with the Catholic and Royal Army and its leaders was complex and would have been interesting to explore further. It's a shame the film likely didn't have the budget to delve into this, as it could have also demonstrated that Vendée wasn't a monolith.

The depiction of the republican army as well-equipped is somewhat exaggerated. If they were as well-appointed as shown, Carnot and Prieur (Cote D’or) would be out of a job, and Saint-Just wouldn't have needed to requisition shoes for the army.

Lastly, the film underexplains the context of why the counter-revolution started. In my opinion, it manipulatively emphasises the king's execution more than warranted, suggesting it triggered the popular uprising when it really did not. The conflict in Vendée began as a peasant revolt, where the local population was far more concerned with religious issues than royal politics. Most Vendean peasants likely couldn't name the king—they probably knew he was a Louis since there had been a Louis on the throne for 200 years, but that's about it. Their concerns were local: when parish priests who had taken the civic oath replaced their traditional priests, and the Levée en masse was decreed, forcing them to fight random Germans 600 km away for a regime threatening their way of life, they rebelled.

Is the movie anti-Republican propaganda?

To wrap up, is the film anti-Republican? Frankly, I don’t believe it is overtly so. It adopts a somewhat clichéd stance: the revolution's ideals were noble, but things eventually went too far. While I have plenty of thoughts on this—which I'll keep to myself for now—I wouldn’t say this perspective is inherently anti-Republican.

Charette is depicted as initially supportive of the revolution, which is accurate for many aristocrats, especially the minor nobility. The portrayal of Republican soldiers is balanced, with General Jean-Pierre Travot sometimes appearing more honourable than Charette. As the main character, Charette is shown as lazy, indecisive, and sometimes brutal, so the film does not attempt to heroise him. The princes, especially Artois, are also depicted negatively. So, the film isn’t overtly royalist.

Is there a specific stance against the Government (aka the CSP)? I don’t recall them being mentioned, which, again, is accurate since most Vendeeans, including the nobility, were not deeply involved in Parisian politics.

That being said, Carrier and Turreau are portrayed very negatively, and rightfully so. Republican generals are also shown as less likely to spare the "brigands" when captured, which aligns with historical accounts. The movie leans heavily on shock value, featuring hard-to-watch scenes of executions, guillotines, and drownings. Unfortunately, even the staunchest republican historians would be hard-pressed to find the evidence to call those scenes revisionists.

Beyond that, the only thing that stood out to me about the Republicans is that they made Kleber look about 60 years old.

In conclusion, is this the most accurate film ever? Certainly not. Is it counter-revolutionary propaganda? I genuinely don’t think so, and if someone claims otherwise, they’re likely being disingenuous.

TLDR:

Watched the movie "Vaincre ou Mourir," which felt like a medieval theme park show—entertaining but lacking depth, probably due to its funding by an actual historical theme park. Despite its attempt to appear historically accurate with expert interviews, the film fails to deeply explore its characters or the complexities of the Vendée region's history. While it doesn't contain major historical inaccuracies, it oversimplifies the causes and events of the Vendée uprising, focusing more on visual shock than factual explanation. Not outright anti-Republican or counter-revolutionary, but doesn't offer new insights into anything. Overall, flashy but not as informative as it could be.

Notes

A memory space is defined as a location (physical or otherwise) where memories, histories, and narratives are preserved, shared, and understood within a society or culture. Things like museums, monuments, rituals, stories and in this case a region can be memory spaces

Château de la Durbelière was the home of La Rochejaquelein

PS: Thank you again for your question! I had a lot of fun answering it.

[thirdtimed]

👁👁 what's orv im intrigued <- fruityghast (sideblog)

smiles at you so serenely. i'm unimaginably delighted to have been asked and on a completely unrelated interest sideblog nonetheless LOL thank you for indulging me!!

--- --- ---

so, what is orv?

omniscient reader's viewpoint, in it's most functional definition, is a behemoth of a korean web novel spanning well over 500 chapters. this admittedly makes it a little difficult to describe in full scope. if you'd like a more detailed post explaining it & its main appeal i recommend ot3's post!

but here's my attempt at a shortened summary for you:

orv is about a down on his luck office worker, kim dokja, who indulges in web novels as the only means of escape from his brutally mundane daily life. his utmost favorite web novel is a long winded, complicated, and incredibly boring story that no one else has the time or patience to read, leaving him as its sole reader. despite this, the novel has continued to update for the past 13 years, even if seemingly only for him. one day, after more than a decade of single-handedly reading and supporting this story, the author gives out a notice they'll be concluding the series at long last. but before dokja can read its last chapter, the world shifts and changes, and the novel itself comes to life a la reverse isekai. the world has become the novel. and as its sole reader, dokja has now become one of the only people to know the world's future. he spends the rest of the story trying to guide the ensuing chain of events in a more favorable direction than the one he read-- all so he can finally reach the end, that final chapter that he never got to finish.

i think at its heart orv can be best surmised through its main refrain: "this story is for that one reader." it's an action packed shounen fantasy death game adventure story BEHEMOTH; but at its heart lies one of the most sincere love letters to the art of storytelling i've had the chance to read. it loves cliches and cheesy tropes and mary sues and everything else we're told is "bad" about fiction unabashedly, because it loves you, the reader, for taking the time to read it regardless.

i talk about it within the context of life series watcher lore mostly because they share metanarrative elements and because i as a person am kind of always ambiently musing about orv, but otherwise they are two very different media. I'm really happy to have gotten the chance to ramble about this though!

if you read all of this first of all 1) thank you so so so much and 2) PLEASE FORGET EVERYTHING I SAID IN MY PREVIOUS POST THAT WAS ALL MAJOR SPOILERS>. MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS LOL. LMAO EVEN.

--- --- ---

okay, so how do i read it?

if youre still interested, i tentatively recommend starting with the webtoon adaptation before jumpping into the web novel. i personally found the english translation of the web novel clunky and hard to read at first, and thus neglected to finish orv for the longest time. that is, of course, until i reread the webtoon and got left on a cliffhanger so bad that i finished all 551 novel chapters within the span of a week.

there's problems with the webtoon adaptation of course, but i think its translation is slightly more accessible & its visuals make it an easier read than diving headfirst into a novel. but do consider making the jump to the novel earlier than later though, it's an incredibly gratifying read if you do make it all the way to the end.

okay im done thank you for this ask!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! explodes into a million particles

[decepti-thots]

☕ Shattered Glass?

I actively dislike SG as it's been executed to date... a lot, lol. The problems with it for me are numerous, but to sum up the major ones:

The entire trope of a Star Trek-esque 'mirror universe' only works when this is a story within the 'main' continuity, as a narrative device that exists in the context of the work it's created to interact with. These kinds of stories are about, well, holding a narrative mirror up to the characters and setting of your work to contrast with them in a way that allows you to explore some core idea. But Transformers fandom is constantly insisting we want a Shattered Glass fiction continuity that exists in itself (see: that atrocious IDW miniseries they did), at which point this is just a bunch of random new characters, practically speaking. I mean. Listen. Shattered Glass Megatron in a side-story of a cartoon or comic is a 'what if?' story you can do something with; Shattered Glass Megatron in a comic that is Literally Just SG Stuff is simply Optimus Prime with a different alt mode and name, i.e. pointless.

It's also then hampered by the fact that even though the original incarnation WAS that kind of thing to some extent, it was uhhh. Bad. It was bad. Especially because it has no consistency with its gimmick: is it reversed morality or reversed personalities? Some characters seem to be just the former, but then some characters- but not all- are the latter. And then some decisions are just incredibly random? But TF fandom refuses to let anyone start from scratch by picking an actual solid concept and starting over from whatever they pick, everyone would throw a hissyfit if they fully started over, and we're stuck with all those initial weird choices from a really bad comic written for the fanclub years and years ago. Doesn't help, really.

I think SG could potentially be really fun in like. A two-parter gimmick episode of a cartoon, or a short arc in an ongoing comic, or whatever. You know. Like how the 'mirror universe' trope actually usually works. But instead we get fandom clamouring for it to be a whole line of independent fiction, and it inevitably sucks whenever some vague attempt comes about, so then everyone wants to clamour for them to do it AGAIN to make it BETTER, but. It won't be better! The concept just isn't built for that!!

Honestly, if it had just stayed some admittedly pretty cool toys and tantalising character bios handed over to fandom to have fun coming up with ideas for, that would have been ideal. A bunch of redeco'd and repurposed toys with some 'what if...?' style character bios for people to draw and play with in fandom spaces is really where that sort of idea thrives.

[szmacblog]

Roundtable Presentations: Aladdin (1992)

In what ways does the film's score situate the story with its narrative context?

The score makes extensive use of Middle Eastern and Arabic musical influences to establish the setting of the fictional city of Agrabah. Composer Alan Menken incorporates instruments like the oud, duduk, and ney to lend an authentic ethnic sound and flavor to the music. This helps transport the audience to the film's Arabian setting. It also uses musical themes and motifs to represent key characters and narrative elements. For example, the heroic "A Whole New World" theme is closely associated with Aladdin and Jasmine's blossoming romance, while Jafar's sinister intentions are conveyed through ominous, minor-key musical cues. These thematic associations help guide the audience through the film's story.

How do songs use character performance to push the cultural authenticity in the film's diegesis?

The songs in Aladdin also use character performance to enhance the cultural authenticity of the film’s diegesis. The film mostly showcases kind of an energetic, campy-comic flair that evokes the spirit of classic Hollywood musicals. On the other hand, Jasmine's solos are more introspective, contemporary-sounding ballads that reflect her personality and desire for agency, as she lives overprotected under her father's wing.

The music in Aladdin goes beyond just setting the scene. It borrows heavily from Middle Eastern musical traditions. This is clear in the prominent vocals, a common feature in Middle Eastern music. The instruments used, like percussion, strings, and wind instruments, also mirror those found in the region. Even the melodies themselves are crafted to evoke Middle Eastern music through the use of chromaticism and ornamentation, which helps capture the unique musical qualities of that part of the world. It's important to remember though, that despite the inspiration from "One Thousand and One Nights," Aladdin remains an American animated musical at its core. The music reflects this by blending these Middle Eastern influences with classic Broadway elements.

In what ways does the film use musical "framing" to structure the score within familiarized styles?

The entire story itself is presented as a performance by the Genie. This echoes the traditional concept of a frame narrative, where a story is told within the context of another story.  Musically, this is reflected in the opening number, "Arabian Nights," which establishes an exotic, Arabian Nights-inspired soundscape that serves as the backdrop for the film's musical journey. Within the Arabian Nights frame, the songs incorporate familiar musical styles from various cultures and eras—which in my opinion, goes against the whole point of making this an "Arab musical film." Similar to when they make Latinx musical films from, for example, Mexico, but they include songs or influences from many Latinx countries.

Moreover, "One Jump Ahead" uses a Broadway showtune style with a fast tempo, kind of emulating Aladdin's frenetic life on the streets. On the other hand, “Prince Ali" is a big, bombastic production number with influences from Bollywood and pop music, and A Whole New World is a romantic ballad with an orchestral sound, reminiscent of classic Hollywood musicals.

[louis-disciple]

S H O W vs F A N D O M | T A K E S

· Abuse

· Racism

· Trans Talk

· Hyper: Masc/Fem-inisation

· Personal feelings

⚠ T A K E N O T E ⚠

Something being labeled as "gothic" does NOT excuse or justify the abuse/racism that characters face within a story.

Gothic literature and media often explore dark and complex themes, including horror, mystery, and the supernatural, as well as intense emotional experiences such as suffering and despair.

While gothic works often depict extreme situations, this does NOT make the abuse portrayed any less serious or real.

It's important for creators and audiences alike to recognize that, even within fictional or stylized settings, the treatment of characters—especially when it involves abuse—can have significant implications for how certain themes are understood and internalized by the audience.

Ultimately, the gothic genre may frame such experiences within a particular atmosphere or aesthetic, but it doesn't excuse or normalize the abuse itself. Instead, it should be treated by the audience with care and serve to highlight the consequences and complexities of such experiences, often in a way that provokes thought and discussion among readers or viewers.

The portrayal of abuse/racism in such stories should be critically examined, and its impact on the characters and the narrative should be understood within the context of the genre.

Just because a work is gothic does not mean it’s immune from criticism or accountability regarding how it handles themes of abuse and racism.

!! This applies to ANY prejudice done to characters in the story !!

[kuiperror]

TELL ME ABOUT THE CHIPMUNKS LORE. pretty please.

1st thank you for indulging me (even tho i asked lol) 2nd.maybe dont open this unless you want to get blasted with useless information + unimportant yet dearly held opinions + offtopic addendums + true sincerity. i tried to hold back guys im sorry. hold onto your hats im getting fucking crazy in here

firstly ill summarize and say that my "version" of the story of aatc [1] is basically just an idealized version of the "lore" the 1960s version gave us (i say "lore" in quotations bc there was. none lol).

now a lot of my ideas concerning the "lore" of story are interconnected to my opinions about the actual application of aatc media in real life . for instance, the story is set, vaguely, around the late 1950s - early to mid 1960s, like the irl "run" of the original chipmunks records. i personally believe that, as a real media franchise, aatc really has no reason to exist within our modern world with the technology we have today [2] so aatc as a fictional story is affected similarly. along with that, when the story is played out in the context of 1960s america it creates a richer thematical experience as the themes are compounded and expanded on. [3] a lot of the themes that i consider Essencial to the story deal with acceptance of differences and familial love and questioning of ones own humanity and sense of belonging, both within oneself and within the family unit and within larger society, and conservative 1960s suburban america is just a rlly good backdrop to place all of that. so basically i believe in the Contextuality of 1960s aatc and i love to allude to those contexts within the story.

another thing about my version is that i allow it to be inconsistent both with itself or with real life, just cuz it doesn't really have to be. for instance, this story has a floating timeline and i consider the chipmunk's ages to range from 8 - 10 years old— theodore is 8, alvin is 9, simon is 10. (simon is the oldest in the 1960s era idc who says what, i will die on this hill) however at the same time i think it would make the most sense for them to come from the same litter, which would make them all the same age. so i consider the chipmunks to be different ages while also considering they were born at the same time. i do have an in-world resolution for this discrepancy [4] but you get what im saying: my version of events is a little fictional story for me and me only so inconsistencies like that can be brushed over . mainly so i don't think too deeply about the logistics of things (cuz i tend to do that to avoid any possible criticism cuz i am Afraid of flaw) . like i'll catch myself being like "but how does the development of a real 8yo match theodore's behavior? 🤨" and i have to tell myself "bro.. this is a fictional cartoon world ur literally talking about a talking chipmunk its Not That Serious it doesn't have to be that realistic dude" so i just say its my own little play place and i get to do what i want :)

my version of the backstory of the chipmunks is not really all there in terms of external and internal consistency, but it mostly resembles the 1980s series' backstory where dave finds the chipmunks on his doorstep. (see [4] for entire story) i think that the months after dave took them in were honestly a p dark period for the family. i don't imagine dave had good support system and i think the mental struggle of suddenly caring for 3 incredibly strange children all the while fearing societal reactions to them (which restricted him from getting the help he needed) [5] definitely aged him. ithink hes like, early 30s when the chipmunks arrive, late 30s when the timeline "starts floating"... not as young as most (?) fans/iterations interpret him to be. i think that, before "the chipmunk song" was created, dave had raised the chipmunks for like.. 3-5ish years. what i'm saying is that dave definitely took in the chipmunks out of the kindness of his own heart and not cuz he wanted to capitalize on their singing prowess (aHEM looking at a certain movie 🤨)

also, i like to accentuate the animal-ness of the boys by taking real world information about chipmunks and applying it to them :) in general its a little bit of a pet peeve of mine when ppl just completely disregard the animal part of funny animal characters... esp with alvin and the chipmunks bc thats like. Their Whole Thing . they are chipmunks ? why do you just ignore that 😭

now i have talked a LOT about angsty stuff but i do want to make it clear that legit all this stuff is the subtext and background for interactions shown within the 1960s chipmunk media. the chipmunks are still happy kids who have fun and goof around and piss off david !! its just that they have fears and their own Issues like any real person.

so yeah! thats my chipmunk lore!! ^^ i have a whole document about my version so im definitely. fucking insane about the chipmunks. if any other aatc fans are reading this please be nice to me 😦 i feel as though i am very much a weirdo in my sandbox all alone soo dont h8 me plz :)

and just to send it off with some silly lore here are some random headcanons for each character that i have taken straight from my lore document ^^

alvin: would 100% be a leash kid . just sayin (as a former leash kid myself)

alvin: takes after david musically— when he writes his own music and makes up little songs to himself it sounds very similar to the songs dave writes. alvin doesn't recognize this but dave definitely does :,)

alvin: insecure about his height and constantly reassures himself that he will have a growth spurt when hes older

simon: loves loves LOVEs non-conventional and instrumental music! especially those set in different modes

simon: astronaut kid he loves space and wants to b an astronaut . born at just the right time B)

simon: knows better than to follow along with alvin's troublemaking + rebelliousness, occasionally tries to push back, but often is just like. fuck it we ball and goes along with it, especially if its fun ^^

theodore: LOVES the technical aspect of music + the recording process . he will tell you all about the science behind how vinyl records work unprompted.

theodore: doesnt like to sing solos as much as his brothers do bc of past childhood asthma at age 3 and also because he can not stop himself from giggling when hes singing hes just so happy :)! (THIS ONE IS CANON 💥💥💥 SOURCE: UP ON THE HOUSETOP CHRISTMAS W THE CHIPMUNKS VOL 1 ‼️)

theodore: although he is the most naive of the bunch, he is not dumb . hes just a little kid who likes being silly !

dave: before taking the chipmunks in in his early 30s he was the world's most regular guy . wrote hits for other people, continues to do that occasionally into the boys's careers

dave: literally has a song for everything . he will do everything to a beat .

dave: embroiders and cross-stitches to regulate his anger + knows how to sew really well since he has 2 make all of the boys' clothes. (CANON ⁉️😍) also it was his decision to color-code and embroider their initials onto everything they wear lmfao

FOOTNOTES (color coded for your convenience!)

[1] - in this post i refer to the media franchise as "aatc" (alvin and the chipmunks) and refer to the actual trio of characters as "the chipmunks" to avoid confusion. i just want it to be said that i personally dont like to call the media franchise "alvin & the chipmunks" on account of the whole "uuu if alvins a chipmunk why is it called alvin & the chipmunks" joke, i personally prefer to call the franchise just "the chipmunks" as it is shorter and includes the 1960s era as for most of it the franchise went by several different iterations (if we lived in a perfect world the franchise would still be called "david seville and the chipmunks" . just saying)

[2] - back in the early 60s, combining pitch-shifted vocals and character-acting was an innovative technique that took real time, effort, knowledge and skill to achieve. but nowadays not only is the concept no longer fresh but literally anyone can create their own "chipmunk" vocals in a matter of minutes. the story & characters (also nostalgia) are really the only thing keeping the aatc franchise going, esp since that's what more modern iterations of aatc focus on rather than the actual music.

[3] - in the media outside of their albums (the alvin show & the dell comics, specifically) there is always an underlying theme of comparison between david and the boys and the 1960s concept of a nuclear american family. its not exactly an "Intentional" theme, it more or less comes with the (irl) time-period the original aatc media was created in. the seville household is, inherently, a subversion of the ideal of the "perfect family" that households were compared against and strived to be, even at the expense of their own comfort, ideals, safety, etc. this subversion can be played into for drama and angst in a richer, more plausible way than it would be if the story were set in a more modern time period, u know? but yeah i believe that, as a fictional story, aatc shouldn't be divorced from the context of the attitudes and values of what mainstream society thought a family should be in the 1960s.

[4] - essentially in my version of events, dave was given no information about the boys and he basically made up their ages. when david found them in his backyard, they were oversized chipmunks as large as your average cat. they all sort of acted like young human children, but they were a lot more... chipmunk than child. they could only babble— but the sounds were recognizable as human speech. dave was obviously freaked out and resolved to keep an eye on them whenever they were in his backyard. he really only resolved to take them in due to the fact that he could literally see them change throughout a single week. how i imagine the chipmunks' biology is that they are a mixture of human and chipmunk (not literally, mind you, more as a physiological, figurative thing) so they have the intelligence and development of a human while still doing certain things like undertaking hibernation, wanting to forage and stockpile and burrow, things like that. however their growth rate is incredibly fucked up, going from the actual size of a newborn baby chipmunk to the size of a human toddler within like, a year. with this rapid growth also comes more human-like intelligence. once they were actually living in his house, dave knew there was something human about them with these creatures so he couldn't just let them return to the wild, especially since they were becoming more and more dependent on him and more and more human-like as days passed... i definitely think there was a moment of pure clarity for dave where he realized like. wow, that's a child. these things are children. and they are relying on me to provide for them. they are absolutely attached to me by now. and i think i might actually be attached to them too. and thats when he decided to name them and truly care for them like any other human child. overtime the chipmunks slowed their growth rate and matched their developing rate with the same as an average human. the chipmunks don't remember much of their early childhood and nothing can really be disputed so davids word of what happened is gospel. And yeah thats their backstory basically. if you want more on dave's view point on the chipmunks and their fucked up growth process, you can read this post here :)

[5] - he overcame this, of course. he did not want the boys to think that he was ashamed of them. public school was a different story, however, and the boys were more-or-less in a state of homeschooling before the release of "the chipmunk song." knowing that most of their peers would actually look up to them rather than down upon them extremely reassured him.

[evercelle]

i’m a huge danganronpa fan so it’s been super fun to see you getting into v3!!! i’d love to hear what you thought of the last trial/the ending! it’s super divisive but i personally love it and think it’s really clever and creative.

ooooh yeah sure let's talk about v3!! happy sixth anniversary to the game that knocked me over and stole my attention span for the last couple months. i'm in the camp that loved the ending, and i'll cut the rest for spoilers:

i can definitely understand why the ending is divisive, but i thought the final trial and the meta-narrative of "danganronpa has always been fictional within its own canon" were cleverly executed and beautifully tied to the driving theme of the game itself. because v3's core mechanics revolve around truth and lies, the central thesis of the game (to me) is "perception affects reality." the big twist ending (and the reactionary emotions it causes for players) really highlights that theme.

when you think about the game, there were hints left and right that the killing game was a show from the very beginning (literally. from the title screen, which displays a disclaimer "characters depicted are fictional" a la tv shows), but because players (and especially long-time DR fans--as a send-off game in the franchise, it takes advantage of "standard DR tropes" to great effect) have certain expectations coming into the game as to what the story is or should be like, it's easy to overlook those clues...! because you have those preconceptions, the average player isn't looking for those clues, so when you finally get to the Big Twist you're totally staggered by that reveal, even though characters (amami, ouma, saihara) have explicitly told or speculated to the player throughout the game that things aren't what they seem.

saihara as the protag's early (and then ongoing) character arc deals with averting his eyes from the truth, because he's afraid of what must follow. it's a parallel for the player's experience in the final trial, which slowly leads you to the only possible conclusion (everything you know is a lie) and then links up to the secondary thesis of the game by setting up and then subverting standard DR/video game conventions (if we just believe in hope, we can get through this!! ...actually, that's wrong!): perception affects reality, and your own perception & agency shapes your world view. though shirogane tries to mindbreak saihara by showing the pre-game videos and asserting that everything about their present selves are all fabricated and therefore meaningless outside of the context they were created for, saihara concludes that ultimately, it doesn't matter--his experiences, his memories, his bonds, and his choices belong to him and shape his future. for the player, you get to make the same choice in interpreting the ending--whether you believe the ending is real (the classmates actually died) or fake (it was all a virtual simulation) is left up to you. your perception and your choice!!

overall, the driving theme that truth and lies are closely entangled was very well-executed, in my opinion! especially embodied in ouma as a whole and in trial 5, but that's a whole separate post lol... what you assumed was true wasn't, things that appeared to be lies perhaps weren't... infinite possibilities offered by a kind or useful lie, versus the narrow reality of a single harsh, objective truth; having the steel to pursue the truth to the very end; and finally, choosing to stand by your truth and forge onward, no matter what. that's what saihara's journey + the final trial is all about...!!

p.s. i enjoyed saihara as a character throughout the game but trial 6 made me just fall in love with him HAHA when he becomes intensehara is sooo choice. one of the reasons i love trial 6 is that it once again subverts itself in clever ways!

doing the standard video game-ish "we are in the pit of despair... wait, we just have to believe in each other and work together (game UI is literally lighting back up, coming back to life)" only to reverse into saihara realizing wait no. that's the trap!! fuck despair AND hope, actually!!! saihara rules

you get a parallel to chp 1 switching protags (akamatsu->saihara) with the switch from saihara->kiibo, but interestingly enough, you don't win against saihara. when you rebuttal showdown it's kiibo who is swayed

mechanically refusing to play the minigames in order to ruin the show was awesome and an excellent call back to ouma's FTE #5, when he implies that sometimes you win a game by simply not playing. (funny story about that actually - i DID attempt to play the nonstop debate you're supposed to not participate in during the last leg of trial 6 just because i wanted to see what would happen, and it auto game overs. LOL)

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Explore my bookshelf!

Thanks for the tag, @theghostinthemargins, this is fun!

An estimate of how many physical books I own: By my count, 396. Split between fiction, nonfiction, and travel guides.

Favourite author: I would say Tolkien! My three favourite books, all tied for first place are The Silmarillion/LOTR (I refuse to separate them), Les Misérables, and Jane Eyre. They’re the ones I can reread an uncountable number of times and never get tired of, and they all speak things that I find true and meaningful. But Victor Hugo and Charlotte Brontë have written other things I don’t care for as much, so Tolkien would be my overall favourite author.

A popular book I've never read and never intend to read: I’m sure there are a lot, I don’t tend to really get into a lot of contemporary non-speculative-fiction novels.

A popular book I thought was just meh: The Queen’s Thief series didn’t really catch me after the first two books, so I stopped. Though I didn’t catch all the twists in the first one, I felt a lot of it was telegraphed too heavily and I’d read another book that did the same thing but better. And the writing style didn’t pull me in; at times in the second one it felt like I was reading a Cliff Notes summary of the book rather than the book itself, or a brief history textbook from the book’s world. It’s a shame because I liked the relationship twist, I wanted to be into the book, but I wasn’t.

Longest book I own: Probably Complete Shakespeare (1164 pages in small font) in word count. Les Mis has more pages (1222) but larger font. My World Book Encyclopedia for the letter ‘A’ is probably also a contender in total word count (980 pages, small font, larger pages than the others).

Longest series I own all the books to: Either The Stormlight Archive or A Song of Ice and Fire depending on whether we’re going by word count or number of books.

Prettiest book I own: I’m very fond of The World of Ice and Fire, it’s a real visual treat. Fandom is making me want to invest in an illustrated Silm or LOTR. I’d have bought the nice version of Sanderson’s Tress of the Emerald Sea if shipping costs weren’t so ridiculous, it’s gorgeous and I love it, but I really can’t justify a hundred-dollar price tag when I already own the ebook.

A book or series I wish more people knew about: Several recommendations, including Piranesi (gorgeous, fantastical writing, some of the most beautiful and creative fantasy I’ve read in a while), The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (excellent vampire story, the only one I’ve seen that is as good as or better than the original Dracula, and plays off the original’s use of documents (diaries, letters, etc.) by having three histories nested within each other: the main character, her father in the ‘70s, and his thesis advisor in the ‘30s). If you enjoy the way The Historian is written even apart from the vampires, you will probably also love People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, which tells the story of an old and precious book and the Jewish families who owned it through history, via the modern plot of a woman carrying out document analysis of it the book the context of the 1990s Yugoslavian wars. It is very, very good.

For non-fiction, some recs are:

The Civilizations of Africa: A History to 1800 by Christopher Ehret, the best textbook on pre-colonial African history I’ve found, extremely interesting

The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan, a history through the lens of Eurasian connections (the parts between the fall of the Roman Empire and the later Middle Ages were especially interesting and novel - did you know Ethiopia invaded the Arabian peninsula? or that there was a Jewish (converted) state in Central Asia? or all kinds of stuff about the Zoroastrians?)

Paris 1919: Margaret MacMillan’s breakdown of the personalities involved in the Treaty of Versailles, and how their decisions set the stage for the rest of the 20th century; still a classic.

If you’re at all interested in Canadian history or in the Great Depression, and want to see how bad it can get in a country that didn’t have an FDR, Pierre Berton’s The Great Depression is a brilliant, passionate, and scathing text on that period in Canada, with a lot of idiots and brutes in power and some truly inspirational figures outside of power.

If you’re interested in US Reconstruction history, Capitol Men is a great book on the first Black members of Congress post-civil-war.

Book I'm reading now: Jurassic Park, Agrarian Socialism (about the rise of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, a socialist party that gave rise to the present-day social democratic NDP; I’ve gotten stalled, I need to finish this), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, History of Middle-earth vol 9 Sauron Defeated (I got it out of the library for the epilogue and I’ve read that, but I want to check out The Notion Club Papers before I return it), and just finished a reread of Mansfield Park.

Book that's been on my TBR list for a while but I still haven't got around to it: Shantaram; it’s a novel based on the author’s very eventful life.

Do you have any books in a language other than English: Have yes, have read, no. 😔 In various fits of ambition I’ve bought Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and Journey to the Centre of the Earth in the original French, as well as a couple French-language histories, with the intent of using them to practice, and then my French is too weak and I just don’t stick to it. I’m only a few chapters i to any of them. Les Mis is too much for me to do more than try to enjoy a handful of passages in the original, but I really would like to finish Journey to the Centre of the Earth and one of the histories that interests me.

Paperback, hardcover, or ebook?

Mainly paperbook or ebook. I prefer reading paperbacks, it’s easier to focus and better for my eyes than ebooks (screentime is…most of my waking hours, it’s not good) and I find it more enjoyable, but ebooks have the benefit of convenience and being very fast to acquire; if I want to read a new release right away and the ebook is cheap, I’ll take it over the hardcover. I’ve only purchased 23 ebooks but have a huge stash of free ones from Project Gutenberg.

[phoenixtakaramono]

The Boys, choose violence 10, 22, 24 if you please. :D

From the 🔥Choose Violence Ask Game🔥

Thank you, @kosmochlor, for the Ask! Ahh, and I see we’re going straight for the jugular!! 🔪(⊙v⊙✿) These are just a few personal honest opinions written at 1:40AM. What I think does not apply to everyone. ♥️

10. worst part of fanon

Keyboard warriors. The morality police clutching their pearls. You know who I’m referring to; we always have them in every fandom. The ones who police who/ what you like and are obnoxiously loud about it and about how the characters or ships you find interesting are problematic and, lookie here, my [insert character they’d fixated on] never did anything wrong compared to your rancid skrunkly blorbo and I wish more fans liked my favorite character than [insert popularly liked character]. On the converse of that, I’m on two fences when it comes to Homelander stans. Thankfully most people are rational and like him because he’s an interesting villain (and, let’s be real, it’s powered by a side of fan thirst for the actor who plays him; it’s the typical parasocial relationship that fans develop with the celebs who play our favs/ or it’s just plain interest in the fictional character itself or the fun thought of that fictional fav being railed or doing the railing)—but I do have to raise an eyebrow when he is being stanned for all the wrong reasons (coughfascistallegorycough coughMAGAallegorycough coughSigmamalecough).

It’s a very interesting outlook to have as someone who isn’t as into Homelander as other people but still goes out of my way to read and write stories of him being shipped with his enemy Billy Butcher (listen, I’m your average law-abiding 28 y/o woman who works M-Sat 9AM-5:30PM and sometimes even Sundays and even overtime; sometimes on my limited free time I just wanna indulge and imagine about what it’d take to save the metaphorical world in this fictional universe—aka by having the two toxic old men f*ck each other and they can be two co-dependent psychos in love terrorizing the world together as a shameless power couple in a perpetual Ouroboros cycle of love and hate and self-punishment; obviously I do not condone this kind of relationship irl but within the safety of my imagination, we writers be playing god. It’s fairly obvious both characters are fated to have a bad ending in the show, especially if they follow in the footsteps of comic canon for a bittersweet ending, so let me have fun on my very limited free time writing my alternative Butchlander takes about these manipulative assh0les obsessing over each other and the fate of the world depending on how successful they are at gaslighting each other into playing a permanent happy couple).

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

Homelander is canonically bi in the comics. No, I’m serious.

(Spoiler alert: for those without context, in the comics, Soldier Boy was not Homelander’s father. In the comics, male Stormfront was one of the Supes whose DNA was reused by Vought to create new and stronger versions of the source material, so his DNA resulted in baby!HL’s creation no, comic HL did not f*ck male Stormfront; in a way, HL is kinda a partial clone of comic!SF. Whereas in the show, Soldier Boy was changed to be a super straight (?) alpha male granny f*cker who was later revealed in the season to be the sperm donor for Homelander. And Stormfront, as we know, was genderswapped in the show and changed to be Homelander’s girlfriend in S3. …There’s no confirmed Sweet Home Alabama vibes yet as of 2023 but there is understandably fan speculation for a reason.)

I believe the best way to put it: Homelander is generally attracted to women, but in later issues he reveals that he has a secret liking to men. Because he’s The Homelander; he can do whatever the f*ck he wants.

And let’s not forget this beautiful iconic scene the TV adaptation gifted to us:

Now some personal opinion time: I also like the idea of him being a narcissist so he only truly loves himself. And others can come close (especially if he sees aspects of himself in them) but his One True Love will always be himself. It’s the classic Narcissus looking at his mirror reflection allegory—but now you mix it in with some complicated cocktail of a God complex, inferiority complex, imposter syndrome, self-hatred, and sociopathy or psychopathy and a hidden desire of wanting to fit in with the banal societal human norms of being accepted but always feeling left out on the other side of the glass wall looking in. Now you tie it in with him never finding anyone who’s “genuinely loved him” (by his own criteria) and has not regarded him as a monster to be feared. He’s desperate for that human connection, for that elusive “perfect companion” who will understand him and cater to him and put his needs above their own—and to him, finding that proves he’s not a freak of nature. He’s not a monster. He’s not a failed product. He’s not a pathetic excuse of a man that even Soldier Boy didn’t even want as a son. Vogelbaum—and everyone else just doesn’t understand. People love him, right? Vought and Madelyn have indoctrinated him into believing he’s the people’s hero—and how they adore and worship him and want to be him or want to f*ck him. How can he, The Homelander, a superior being with his perfect genetics who’s better, stronger, smarter and more attractive than anyone else (I hope you can tell I’m being heavily sarcastic here), go out on a limb and fail at finding this one intangible thing that ordinary mudpeople or his inferiors can find but he somehow can’t?

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

It’s almost always political discourse particularly from extremely delusional right-wingers people who have terrible media literacy of what they’re watching versus what might be clear-cut to the rest of us—and discourse of whether or not The Boys (TV) is an objectively good show. All of these tend to go hand-in-hand together. I think what those people fail to realize is: the script is written by Eric Kripke, the showrunner behind the first five seasons of Supernatural—and then you have Stephen Fleet, lead VFX supervisor and show producer, who came out at the age of 43 (🏳️‍🌈). They’re adapting it from an edgy, dark, intentionally offensive-just-for-shock-value comic series written by Garth Ennis, the person behind Preacher and even a bit of the Punisher. The eight-volume comic series, which ran from 2006-2012, is full of racist, sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic elements (to be fair, GE wrote this as an intentionally darker satirical take on the superhero culture—and edgy shock factor is a writer’s strategy to make your work stand out). It was meant as a “dark, satirical commentary about the fictional superheroes—and, to an extent, the real life celebrities—we idolize, and how easily people with such power can abuse their responsibility” (source).

With what the TV showrunners had to work with, with the actual source material being a slog kinda to go through (the comics does have its share of good moments admittedly), as a whole I think it’s pretty impressive they’re able to update things to make modern social commentary which are relevant to us today (now, they can be admittedly a bit on the nose about it; one thing that stuck with me till now is how a writer friend I was watching the show with remarked how they’d thought BnHA did the superhero genre commentary much better) and somehow they were able to make a far superior TV adaptation just by paring down and changing a few things from the comics for the better so far (*knocks on wood 3x*). I will however always side-eye anyone who insist the comics is superior than the TV adaptation and loudly proclaim they won’t watch the show because “look how they massacred [insert comic character]” (now, to be fair, normally I would agree with this take but we’ve established The Boys (TV) is a special case; I would also understand if the comics had been the person’s first exposure and, hence, had become their fixation—but considering its intentionally offensive contents I am quietly side-eyeing them from the sidelines and keeping my mouth shut).

[tapwrites]

How to Write Dialogue

A lot of a story is told through narration: action, description, exposition, and so on. But a big part of characters interacting tends to be speech. In prose, we call this "dialogue."

The key to what happens in the scene for this is...

People communicate in their own way.

To a new customer entering their store, a gruff character might say "What do you want?" Whereas a more personable character might say "Welcome in! Can I help you?"

Maybe the character would use body language, with a wave as they speak. Or only use body language to communicate in this moment, with a polite nod and smile to the customer with no dialogue.

If they share some knowledge with character they are communicating with, they may speak differently, with an unspoken shared context for their conversation. Compared to speaking to a character who doesn't have that knowledge.

If both characters have the shared context of knowing Frank is coming for tea at 6, it would be odd if one said "Frank is coming for tea at 6." Because the person they are speaking to already knows that. (Unless they have some reason to believe they've forgotten.)

But it would be natural for one to say, "When was he coming, again?" or "I hope he doesn't start smoking like he did last time," without even declaring who they're talking about, or what the situation is. Just the new stuff. Just like people do in real life.

Think about why the character chooses to speak at this time, not before, not waiting until later? What do they want to communicate? How do they want to communicate it, how do they phrase it, what other things go along with it like tone, volume, body language as I mentioned earlier?

And of course, all of those things are affected by the character's personality, their mood and emotions in that moment, their relationship to the people they are communicating with, and the subject they are talking about.

A lot of times all of that just comes naturally from our understanding of the character, and we don't have to think through each of these one at a time. But if you're stuck, making it more of a "process" can help you get rolling.

And now, onto the mechanics of dialogue in the prose itself...

To mark text as being spoken instead of narration, it should start and end with double-quotes, "like this." There are novels that use single-quotes, but this is a rare exception and tends to be more common in older books. But if that's your thing, you do you.

Apparently, the UK flips this and starts with 'single-quotes'. I've lived in the UK all my life, and was taught to use double-quotes. So... I guess your mileage may vary, I don't know what that's all about... 😅

If a line of dialogue ends with a complete sentence, it will normally put the punctuation before the last quote. There are exceptions, and stylistic choices, but that's the general rule for dialogue.

"The sky isn't blue."

You can have quotations within the dialogue, marked with single-quotes. And, in theory, the further down the rabbit hole you go, it switches back and forth between single and double quotes.

So, a quote within dialogue has single-quotes. A quote within a quote within dialogue has single quotes again. And so on...

"And he said to me, 'Go over there and tell them, "Frank said, 'The sky is blue, darn it!'"'"

Yes this does look weird, and yes it can be confusing keeping track of the layers of quotation. Which is why it's very rare, in fiction at least. Instead of making a direct quote, a speaker normally paraphrased, or rewritten in other ways to simplify the structure of the dialogue.

"Frank said to tell you the sky is blue."

If the dialogue ends its own sentence, but the sentence as a whole continues with a dialogue tag, the full-stop/period at the end of the dialogue becomes a comma.

"The sky isn't blue," Geraldine said.

This is because a dialogue tag is actually part of the same sentence.

A dialogue tag is like a luggage tag tied to the end of the dialogue to tell us more about how it was said.

In the example above, there is a dialogue tag to tell us the character who said it: Geraldine.

You could write the dialogue tag in a couple of other ways:

"The sky isn't blue," said Geraldine. Geraldine said, "The sky isn't blue."

But this is uncommon in modern novels, and makes it have a different old-timey vibe that may be confusing or distracting for readers. So bear that in mind if you want to try it out.

Now, if it's part of a longer piece of dialogue, you could leave it to the end of the spoken words to have the dialogue tag as normal. But the reader will be wondering through the whole thing... "Yeah, but who's even saying all this?"

To avoid this, try to have the indication of the speaker sooner rather than later. You can use any of the methods from this article to do so. But one example would be:

"Fourscore and seven years ago," Lincoln said, "our fathers brought forth, on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal..." (and so on)

For longer text like this, you can actually have paragraphs within the dialogue. The paragraph doesn't end in a quotation mark because the dialogue isn't ending. But then the new paragraph does have a quotation mark to remind the reader it's still dialogue.

"Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

Again, confusing to read, and rarely needed or used in modern fiction. But something to know about. A better way would be to break up the dialogue with some "Blocking"--a stage term for people moving around the scene.

This would be a new paragraph, as it focuses on something else, and then another new paragraph continuing the dialogue. If we focus on a different character with the in-between paragraph, you might want to remind them who is speaking when they continue.

Lincoln stood for a moment, taking in the crowd. Then drew in a breath. "Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." The crowd looked uneasy, a low murmur floating across them. Lincoln shook his head. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

Going back to dialogue tags... Other verbs can be used instead of "said," to better describe how it was said.

"The sky isn't blue," Geraldine muttered.

There is a general tip that the same word shouldn't be used over and over in quick succession, because it draws attention to itself. But this doesn't apply to all words. Structural words like "a" and "the" shouldn't (and often couldn't) be replaced with a new synonym every time they're used.

This is because they simply fade into the background; the reader knows that they are common words and don't matter to the meaning of the sentence so much. So they just sort of brush over it. "Said" is one such word.

Don't be afraid of "said."

Some writers still try to not use "said" much, and instead use "thesaurus words"--synonyms with the same meaning--throughout their writing. However this actually draws more attention to it that using the simple "said," which people brush over anyway.

Take a look at the following examples:

"The sky isn't blue," Geraldine said. "The sky isn't blue," Geraldine stated. "The sky isn't blue," Geraldine explained.

Is "stated" describing how the line was said better than "said"? Not really. And is "explained" adding anything to the story that isn't from the dialogue? Nope.

If there is a line of dialogue, then it was said/stated/explained/said in reply/asked, depending on what was said and the context. We know what was said. So when a character asks something, the verb "asked" doesn't do anything that reading the question didn't do. So you may as well put "said."

"The sky isn't blue," Geraldine smirked. "The sky isn't blue," Geraldine yawned.

And if you go too far with it, trying to incorporate an action into it, you can get yourself into a real mess. Smirking is not saying anything. You can smirk while saying something. But if the action you are performing is a smirk, or yawn, or laugh... you, my friend, have uttered no words!

These are known as "said-bookisms": words used to avoid writing "said." And named after a book that was written listing such words for writers to use (you may have seen similar posters/graphics on the internet). But as we don't need to avoid writing "said," we can safely throw out the book!

Earlier we used "muttered" instead of "said." Was that okay? Well, did that add to story? Does it tell the reader more about what was said? Yes! Now they know the words weren't simply spoken; they were said quietly, muttered under the breath.

Anything that tells us more about how the dialogue was said is fine. If the character shouted or screamed, or they muttered or mumbled, or slurred... they aren't necessarily obvious from the dialogue. So if they fit, and they describe the utterance of words, then go for it!

Sometimes writers have entire actions as a dialogue tag.

"The sky isn't blue," Geraldine moved over to the window, peering out.

That action isn't describing the act of saying that dialogue. So it doesn't make sense for it to be part of the same sentence. Just split it into its own sentence, and you should be good.

"The sky isn't blue." Geraldine moved over to the window, peering out.

However, these things may be indicated earlier in the paragraph, before the dialogue begins.

Geraldine looked up. "The sky isn't blue."

Because Geraldine has been established as the focus of this paragraph, any dialogue will be assumed to come from Geraldine.

Here, the first sentence describes an action the character took. But it could be a narrated thought. Or an expression. You can indicate the focus of the paragraph in many different ways, but however you do it, that can be used by the reader to infer who the speaker is.

You can of course add a dialogue tag anyway, using the pronoun of the character.

Geraldine looked up. "The sky isn't blue," she said.

The tone of the dialogue--the way it is said by the character--can also be implied by the context in the paragraph up to that point.

Geraldine laughed. "The sky isn't blue." Geraldine gasped. "The sky isn't blue."

Whatever context the reader has before the dialogue will colour how they "hear" it in their minds as they read.

Geraldine whispered, staring up in awe. "The sky isn't blue." Geraldine screamed. "The sky isn't blue!" Geraldine staggered through the door, drunkenly. "The sky isn't blue."

In the last example, the character's general state or attitude is shown. So as you read what she says, you'll naturally imagine it being said differently. That's the beauty of writing...

The final story in the reader's mind is made from the teamwork between writer and reader.

You can actually get away with having no indication of the speaker at all, in particular circumstances.

Geraldine smiled, her nose wrinkling. "The sky isn't blue." "I think you'll find it is, Gerry dear," Frank muttered, packing. "No, no, you don't understand... the sky is not blue!" "Poppycock." "Look!"

Did you have any trouble knowing who was saying what? If not, why not? Because we had other context clues.

The first couple of lines had the speakers clearly declared. And, as they're the only two characters that are in the scene, it's natural that they'd each take turns--going back and forth in their conversation. Also, if this is in the middle of a book and you're used to how the characters talk differently, that can help too.

Just be careful to not rely on this back-and-forth effect for too long, because it will get confusing after a bit. Just pepper in something to remind the reader of whose turn it is--the character does something as they speak, or a simple dialogue tag is added. And the reader will keep up better.

[rollercoasterwords]

im actually so glad u brought this up bc the “theyre literally wizards its not supposed to be realistic” is one of the most braindead takes ive ever seen from this fandom. wanting our characters to be believable representations of their time and situations isnt a crime

see like. obviously in the first place the discourse is silly bc other people writing fanfiction u personally don't like or enjoy is not hurting u + u don't have to read it, so it's weird 2 even complain abt someone characterizing a character in a way u don't like imo. BUT that aside what interests me in particular abt the specific "they're literally wizards!!!" take is like. the way it treats notions of "reality" in fiction + particularly fantasy fiction.

like....the thoughts r still marinating + i'm still figuring out how 2 articulate this but. even with fantasy stories that are "unrealistic" bc of magic or whatever, there's still like...an internal logic, y'know? like, in this context, someone saying they want a story to feel "realistic" obviously doesn't mean they want it to be an exact mirror of real life--they wouldn't be reading fantasy if they did. but every fantasy is still structured around a society with its own rules and norms, and characters following those rules + norms makes the story feel more coherent, which is largely what allows people to then suspend their disbelief when it comes to the fantastical + magical elements. sure, they're wizards, but because the story still reflects many basic realities that we're already familiar with from our own societies, we are able to explore those realities through a different-yet-familiar lens, and it makes the world itself more believeable--it's like the difference between the fantasy of barbie fairytopia and the fantasy of lord of the rings, y'know? obviously, they are both fantastical stories, but one feels more realistic than the other, because it more closely reflects real societies. and particularly in hp canon-compliant or canon-adjacent fics that are set in that magical universe, we know that wizarding society essentially echoes most of the biases of "normal" society. so somebody saying "it feels more realistic" is obviously referring to like....that internal logic within the fantasy story, y'know? and i'm not sure if the people going "UM but they turn into animals" are willfully misinterpreting the context of "realistic" here bc it's like. a pithy rhetorical move or if there's actually just a lack of understanding or some combination of both but. it's just odd to me.