#fear of the unknown ( about ) ;;

[captainswan618]

there is a person standing 73 yards some distance away, watching you. they look like they’re trying to tell you something. you can’t get away from them, nor can you get close to them. they’re just...standing there.

so your friends and loved ones try to help you by talking to them, and the person must be saying something to them, because they look at you differently now. but you have no idea what it was, all you hear is static.

you try to tell them not to listen to the person, but no matter what you do, no matter how much you plead with them, they look up at you with suspicion-hatred-fear and just run. they don’t care where they’re going, just that you’re not there. and you can’t do anything to stop it.

the more that the people in your life care about you, the worse it is, because anyone who tries to help is turned against you. so you are just gradually shut out of your own life by the people you love the most, until eventually you no longer recognize your surroundings.

there is a person standing 73 yards some distance away, watching you.

[deoidesign]

Thinking about vampires, death, life, and the space they occupy in between

[guest-1-2-3]

when the piece of media explores themes of humanity versus monstrosity. on one hand, it’s “how far can I go before I am just as monstrous as those I deem my enemies? the further i go the more certain i am that i’ve crossed a line. am I even human anymore?” and on the other hand it’s “was the monster always a monster? what makes it evil, what makes it inhuman? what has it done that i fear it?”

in both cases it is “i am looking at the creature I am fighting and i see a mirror of myself. was i always this way? was it always this way?”

[cowlvent]

clara reaching back into the unknown darkness for several long, agonizing seconds "i'm right please god say i'm right" AND THEN SHE IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! the core of their relationship plays out right there: clara can and will defy death, and the doctor will always save clara, even when it seems impossible. (and it's crucial that this is the first really doctor-y moment he has as twelve.) the growth and distortion of these fundamental beliefs drive the two of them to their eventual end.

[to-make-yourself-known]

a twisted sense of self

[pulchrasilva]

Thinking about William as a metaphor for disability again. Thinking about how William got into an accident and suddenly he's watching his body rot and fall apart. How does he cope with that? How do his family and friends cope with that? Thinking about how he died, and in a way he and the people around him have to mourn that. How when you're recently disabled you might mourn the ability you've lost, and people around you might mourn because they believe they've lost something too even though you're still RIGHT THERE. Thinking about the monsters in Deadwood being attracted to the wisps and ultimately forcing him to leave home and how that reflects the world suddenly becoming inhospitable and hostile towards you overnight. How rather than making Deadwood safer for William, he had to just leave. How often the way the world treats disabled people forces them to retreat from it in some way. How William was just arguing that the Lich didn't have rights because it wasn't alive, and then finding out he's dead too. How disabled people have their personhood stripped from them by people who think they'll never be disabled so why should they care. Are you listening to me

[nuge]

leon draisaitl | 32 thoughts | 02/05/2023

***please do not repost anywhere without permission

[mamawasatesttube]

also kon's red mercy hallucination in sb11 #7 being written with cassie presumably dying some horrific death somewhere offscreen but kon witnessing simon killing tim in front of him. there are actually layers here and the extra nightmare of it specifically being tim as the one whose death he witnesses, tim as the one he couldn't save, is a metaphor for the queerness he has been suppressing for so long, and in this essay i will

[mantictiger]

I'm fascinated by Gwendolyn Bouchard for a multitude of reasons (love me a girlfailure) but what I'm the most curious about is why she's so hellbent on having Lena's position at the OIAR. It's been established that the Bouchards are a very well-off family (I can't remember if thats tmagp-specific lore or if that was mentioned in tma as well) so it's not like Gwen needs the job, especially a job that doesn't seem very glamorous. She seems incredibly dedicated to it though (her being so insistent with specific filing of cases in episode 1 I believe? is what piqued my interest) and is so insistent on climbing a corporate ladder that only seems to lead to Lena's position for no real reason. I get the OIAR is a part of the UK government and that could look good if she's trying to get higher-up positions, but the OIAR is certainly far from a respected or well-known organization (as far as I am aware) so I'm not really sure what her goal is here, and I really hope we find out

[paleodictyoptera]

I made something

[sfiltron]

I have been thinking about all this humans are space orcs stuff, and I thought about dodos.

From what I know dodos died because the people who discovered saw them as food, and the dodos didn't had form of defense since they hadn't predators in their island. My point is: dodos didn't feared (or could understand) being hunted, so this little bird didn't react to things that would scare any other animal alike.

That said, the idea of the intergalactic community (said, this common idea of there being an alliance between intelligent species that have reached the stars) having culture shocks between them, and/or us(humans), because of the lack or existence of fears that are not universally shared.

Like, imagine an species who fears wind because it is so similar to how it feels to be attacked by one of theirs planet predators, or aliens being confused by our fear of the unknown, since curiosity is what makes us discover new things.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

Can you expand on what you mean by Baron being "too cool" to really fit a horror monster? It's a very interesting concept and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Is it that they're too active/involved/tangible and it detracts from their scariness?

I feel like I should preface this with a wall of disclaimers lmao 1/I am a hardcore, down-to-the-marrow, avid, deeply sincere horror enthusiast, esp. horror creatures. this usually means my mileage is vastly different from the average populace's, and my scaredy bone has been disintegrated by longterm exposure. most things in a piece of horror media won't scare me! so I practically never use that on its own as the scale to talk abt horror experiences, but when something does scare me it's always a special occasion to be treasured. 2/canon d20 is never really meant to be horror horror, and for good reasons: it doesn't fit the company's output, it takes a kind of carelessness in production estimation that is always a huge risk, it's often vulnerable in a way that kinda goes against how TTRPGs usually facilitates vulnerability, and for most people it's just! stressful! d20, even with the "horror-themed" seasons, generally just plays with horror tropes and stays focused in its goal of being a comedy improv tabletop theater show. 3/fantasy high's chosen system is DnD, which as I've mentioned before is before all a combat-based game system, which means the magic circle of play is drawn based on stats that facilitate and prioritize combat. want or not this affects every interaction you have in the game, and given fantasy high's concept from the ground up (everyone's going to school of DnD stuff to get better at DnD) it's doubly relevant. 4/This Is Fine I have no quarrel with this. my meters are internal, I do not ask this show to be anything it doesn't advertise itself to be, and what it is is fucking great! I like it! when I expand on this ask's question it will be like a physicist going insane in a lab. that's the mindset we're going in with.

disclaimers done. my stance on horror as a genre is that it's a utility genre rather than a content genre or a demographic genre; it is the discard of narratives. it's the trash pile. horror, above being scary, is about being ugly and messy, it's the cracks on the ground any story inevitably steps over to stay a genre that isn't horror. the genre's been around long enough to develop a codex and a general language that medias and makers and enthusiasts of the genre can use to talk about and build onto, but if you go into individual pieces there's really no unifying Horror Story. one person's beautiful life can be another's horror story, it's just how it is.

this makes The Monster a deeply intriguing piece of the genre. thing is a monster is in a decent percentage of any story - it's just when the antagonist force steps into something past a certain line traced out in the story's world. monstrousness is in pretty much every western fantasy story, it's in any story with a hero and something to vanquish or win; more than anything it's a proxy of that thing up there. the line in a narrative's world. the monster is the guard of the unknown lands, where heroic, civilized people don't tread.

what does this mean in the context of horror? the genre is about that perceived lawlessness, that "unknown land" so to say. we're in the monster's home. that's the literary context that we often walk into a horror piece with; the monster knows more than you about where you are. it may not understand you, but it holds more information than you, and with that it moves swifter than you, has more covered than you, and is more assured in its existence in this context than you. it's a struggle to catch up to it, it's nigh impossible to get one over it, and you're never sure it'll 100% work, because you just don't have the information necessary to.

with that framing you can kinda see where I'm coming from here: horror's often about the breaking of rules. I always think a monster's most effective when it breaks well-established rules of both existence and visual storytelling. think Possum (2018) or Undertale's Omega Flowey or the Xenomorph Queen - unique change in medium, unique change in graphic, unique change in design language, etc. in that sense I actually really like how canon baron plays out: they don't really function like anything else in the fantasy high universe, the bad kids have not managed to kill them when they've felled literal gods, their domain in fhjy literally introduces new mechanics to encompass their existence! from an experience design standpoint they slap mad shit. BUT! I can't help finding their character, like as a character riz (and the other bad kids, eventually) interact with, to be very... coherent? in design. this is kinda hard for me to articulate in words, it's more often a sense you get once you've looked at enough of these scrumptious fuckers, their general design and the way they show up is just kinda too clean, so to say. always kinda newly made? fresh unboxed. it, once again, makes sense for their lore - they are looking for more about themself from riz - and their function - they're an antagonist in a game experience, they're meant to be interacted with in a way that produces results and meshes with the existing magic circle - but that shininess takes away from the implied history they should have dominion over and the person they're haunting doesn't.

from another angle there is kinda something there about how put-together canon baron is as a concept; the domain they call home is riz's deep-seeded fears, extremely vulnerable things he's drawn borders around to quarantine and refused to walk into. things that from his perspective would irreversibly shatter certain pleasant fictions his world is built on top of. canon baron, While Extremely Cool, I feel is kinda too neat to connect with and signify the apocalyticized mess that'd result from this paradigm shift. the part where they're in riz's briefcase and looking through every mirror is Very Cool And Fucked Up! but ultimately the show draws a line around them as well, by making game-physical, tangible spaces they're in (the mirrors and the haunted mordred manor) and put riz and the bad kids there only when they need to confront stuff. riz is meaningfully narratively away from baron's unknown land for most of fantasy high.

with that and all of my disclaimers in mind my conclusion here is if canon baron wants to be a Horror Monster they'd have to cross way more lines. be a Lot more invasive. hence (holds up my class swap baron like a long cat)

[tybaltsjuliet]

[gammija]

@a-mag-a-day Today in 'analyzing minor beats', it's being sad about this line:

particularly the 'unless it was a subconscious thing on our part' one -

That in that blink of an eye when the world changed, and victims were being divvied up between the domains, some subconscious part of Martin saw a lonely Tim, and, though it wasn't the one he knew, reached out to pull him close

[sleepygaymerdisease]

youd think that making a story that kind of hinges on its conclusion would mean that i would get around to actually writing the outline of that extremely important conclusion one of these days but no ive been putting that off for multiple fuckin years

[b-blushes]

thursday quest - no physical therapy today - make and eat lunch sooooo early but i can do it!!!!! - get ready for wedding - attend wedding! yay! (: - decompress well when i get home <3