"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).
Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.
29K notes
·
View notes
If a fella makes a nebula right in front of you, how are you not gonna pine after him for 6000 years?
57K notes
·
View notes
Genuinely crying at work rn. They have thousands of old photos (from the 50s to the 90s) they asked me to scan (so they can create a digital archive). Today I found a photo from a 80s protest with a banner that says "FOR THE PALESTINIAN CHILDREN". It's been 40 years. It has been a lot more than that, actually. And still.
15K notes
·
View notes
To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:
A post in 2023:
A post in 2014:
A zoom out of the same post:
This is what a community looks like.
See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.
It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.
Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.
If you want more of something, reblog it.
32K notes
·
View notes
Elle Fanning at the 2024 Met Gala
4K notes
·
View notes
idk how many of you remember this but a few years ago tumblr ran a universally panned ad campaign for (us american) pride month that went "the gayest place on the internet".
well someone planning that campaign dropped in to ask the queer automatticians for advice on that and universally me and the other trans people involved were like "don't do it. i am so serious. don't do it. people on tumblr won't understand that it wasn't automattic who instituted the porn ban, or they will, but they'll recognize that automattic hasn't done anything, hands tied or not, to reverse it. nobody will like this. it will be a disaster." and they thanked us for our thoughts and went ahead with it anyway and then had to do retrospectives about how badly it went and were like "we just didn't know" and [gestures] yeah
[edit: i think the person who rbed saying it was queerest place on the internet was right, my brain is fried, sorry! and that's... even worse lmao]
7K notes
·
View notes
ngl I'm not a fan of how the very necessary discussion of how autistic girls (and many poc for that matter, not that we usually remember this) often end up masking hard due to the pressure to "be ladylike" or "not be too angry" and therefore end up being seen as "very polite" and "mature for your age" and so on and so forth is morphing into being less about how social pressures may impact how autism presents and more about saying "so there's Girl Autism and there's Boy Autism and Girl Autism makes you nice and polite and pleasant but Boy Autism makes you gross and annoying and rude and offputting and no it's not ableist at all to say that being overly excitable or trying to get a turn to talk when you don't know when your turn is or struggling with arbitrary rules is rude and annoying because Girl Autism exists uwu"
8K notes
·
View notes