#from a literary standpoint

[fireworkss-exe]

one thing I hate about tumblr/tiktok/pinterest fandom culture is that it pretends the least appealing/most unlikeable characters don't exist or acts like showing any interest in them means you're defending their actions. like the mouthwashing fandom with jimmy. or the great gatsby fandom with tom.

[starsapphire]

who are the dc/marvel writers we like and who are the ones we dont? i see so much discourse and who you should be reading and who you shouldnt that its sorta disheartening

i took this one to the comic book club server (ages ago when you sent this ask) and our consensus was basically Don't Worry About It. read what YOU want and what seems interesting to YOU, regardless of what other people are saying, and form your own judgements about the writing! there are absolutely writers that are widely disliked by readers either for bad writing or bad politics (or both) but please don't let that keep you from reading things!!! like anything else you should be critical about what you're reading, but there's nothing you can't or "shouldn't" read. have fun with ittttt get silly with it and you will find things you love and things that piss you off and things that inspire a mix of both emotions

[galaxythedragonshifter]

Hvitur deserved better like

I want him to be brought back to life idc how Tui does it. Either that or a Winglet I NEED to know more about this IceWing you have NO idea

He got like

Three or four pages, and then brutally killed by Burn

Also the fact that there's BARELY ANY content on this dragon makes me sad

I've consumed every bit of content I can find

And I'm still not satisfied.

Someone please recommend me something I'm desperate-

[anachronic-cobra]

You know, when I first watched the show Merlin back in the Olde Fandom Days, I hated the ending. But looking back on it as an adult? Merlin was show where fate is hammered in by prophecy every moment things seem like they're going right, and where you have to watch as the protagonist makes every wrong decision in trying to change destiny only to set himself even more firmly on the path to that inevitable tragedy.

Could that prophesied golden age ever have come to be, had Merlin not made the choices he did? Will it still, even after centuries of waiting with no guarantee of a happy ending? What could have been, if Arthur had been given time to come to terms with Merlin's magic? The entire story is about the inescapable and unknowable tide of fate, and ending it on such an uncertain note with no real answers is really the most appropriate way it could've ended given the themes of the show.

[pandelacreme]

a lot of media complaints about having a female character’s arc center patriarchy/sexism for being cliche or woke laziness is kinda… silly

[asukiess]

was reflecting on why I like melancholy endings so much and then remembered that my fav childhood book was charlotte's web

[perksofbeingahalfie]

not that it's usually my thing, but I actually really understand why the omegaverse has such a large presence in the my hero academia fandom/fanfic (it might not actually be that much more than your average fandom, I don't trawl in the abo tag often enough to know, but it seems like it). in a story all about the body and classification you're born into and transcending those boundaries, abo dynamics kinda fits right in. where your biology makes you one thing, beholden to the expectations and discrimination of society, and the very narrative itself structures the world around these categories of people. the same themes are there in both. like I get it metatextually

[kagiura-akira]

If Kagi were a danmei character he'd have a gege kink and you can't convince me otherwise. send tweet

[allyendergirl]

I am woman like this statue is woman

If your goal is to normalize gender-nonconformity you’re gonna have to accept that some people will fuck with gender as hard as they can while still being unequivocally, 100% cis and that is okay. There’s no egg to crack or callout to write. This is a good thing actually.

[prettyboykatsuki-moved]

more than i even like self inserts i love the power of the second person perspective. like from a literary standpoint, the discomfort of you is so deeply appealing to me. it forces the reader to engage with a story in a way it is not required from other perspectives. i like it literature and in video games and in art. i like when a story challenges my concept of self and tells me: forget everything. this is a story about you (disambiguation)

[celestialscreeches]

Thought police? No no no. Nobody's gonna stop you from thinking your weird illegal thoughts, they'll instead sell you quick fixes and pretty shiny things because at the end of the day it's all about mass marketing.

[maxdibert]

I suddenly had a thought. People are always saying that Severus was friends with a group who wanted Lily dead, but she also did the same thing. Not only she becames besties with a group of people who almost got her (former) best friend killed, she married one of them.

The parallels are just wild, because I don't think it was intentional. I don't think we are supposed to compare the death eaters to the maradeurs, but it fits (in a minor scale, of course). Both Lily and Severus ended up siding with people who wanted to hurt their friend. It's too bad that Severus is the only one who regretted it, and we are supposed to believe Lily was super happy with her decision until she died. It could have been so interesting if they both regretted choosing a side and leaving the other behind. It would make their friendship more balanced, even if it was still dysfunctional.

Yes, exactly, the paradox lies precisely in what you’ve pointed out. The narrative leads us to empathise with Lily’s point of view on the basis that Severus associates with people who are potential threats to her (and I say potential because at no point is it suggested that Lily herself was ever harassed or bullied, quite the opposite, in fact). Yet, in an ironically twisted turn, it’s Lily who ends up not only befriending those who had actually abused and mistreated Severus directly, but marrying one of them.

Clearly this wasn’t intentional on Rowling’s part, but it results in a fascinating ethical paradox from a literary standpoint. She wants to sell us the idea that Severus is in the wrong, but isn’t Lily’s position, morally speaking, even more questionable? After all, Severus’s friends never targeted her, never tried to kill her, never publicly humiliated her by stripping her in front of the entire school. Her future husband did, and so did the friends he kept, who later became hers too.

This is exactly why, under critical scrutiny, Lily’s character becomes so ethically fraught. As many others have pointed out, the core issue is that the narrative pressures the reader to choose a side: it pushes you to see one set of actions as immoral and the other as natural or even commendable. But you can’t force a reader to buy into a moral framing that is so fundamentally inconsistent and illogical.

Yes, Lily didn’t owe Severus anything by the time she married James, but that’s not the point, and it’s something we’ve repeated ad nauseam. It’s not about who owed what to whom. It’s about the fact that the narrative wants us to see Lily as some sort of moral compass — as the gold standard of ethical clarity — while simultaneously expecting us to ignore that her idea of “goodness” includes marrying an abuser. Sorry, but that just doesn’t hold up.

[unfairunknown]

Thrilled with the adaptation so far, in love with Ratthi already. He's SO beautiful? Like, golly.

I also love how Mensah comes across as such a mom* (also love her, and she's so so pretty)

Obviously I can't comment what it's like to watch if you don't know the books, but I think they did a great job. With ASR, you have this unreliable narrator who is basically interested in this really interesting world happening around it. But later in the series, as it develops/grows/etc., you'll get these flashes of insight and memory that reframe earlier books such as ASR in such a way that you KNOW how unreliable it has been about itself the whole time.

For instance, on the first read, as a reader, you believe when Murderbot tells you that it's convincingly "passing" as a non-hacked SecUnit.

You learn pretty fast when it meets ART (my FAVORITE character) that it probably wasn't doing a good job AT ALL even if it thought it was.

So, as a *viewer* now, the context is different, and we HAVE to be given understanding to pair with the visuals we will receive. So, we learn earlier that Murderbot is not very convincing at all. That we know it's an unreliable narrator.

Unreliable narrators are my favorite. This is why Harrow the Ninth is my favorite book ever, for the record.

But anyway. I'm pleasently surprised, and I'll see where the series goes from here. I've got thoughts about themes and social commentary and effectiveness of the books etc and that will be interesting to compare, but for now I'm all about the good vibes.

And Dr. Ratthi.

[asnowperson]

A short Takemiya Keiko interview from 1998

My "All Things Takemiya" detective friend, Platypus, provided me with a two-page Takemiya Keiko interview scanned by @97tears from the now discontinued Hato yo! (鳩よ! - Oh, Pigeons!) magazine. It was a literary magazine published between 1983 and 2002—a publication you probably wouldn't look at if you were searching up on Takemiya, ig.

You can see the Japanese original taken from the 1998 April issue of the magazine, and my (poor) translation of it under the cut.

Takemiya Keiko Interview from issue #4 of Hato yo (1998) 

An interview with a master mangaka herself! 

I’ve always wanted to meet them! 1 – Takemiya Keiko 

“I wanted to draw real love” 

Takemiya Keiko. Born in Tokushima in 1950. Debuted with “Ringo no Tsumi” in 1968. Won the 25th Shogakukan Manga Award with “Kaze to Ki no Uta” and “Terra e.” Representative works include “Pharaoh no Haka” among others. “Tenma no Ketsuzoku” is currently being serialized in Asuka Magazine.  

I read “Kaze to Ki no Uta” during elementary school. It has left a very deep impression on me. I remember that when Ms. Takemiya is mentioned. It was like I was looking at something I was not supposed to look, and I still remember the thrill I felt.  Takemiya: Oh, is that so? (laughs) 

Thank you so much for being with me today.   Takemiya: And thank you for having me. 

Shall we start with what prompted you to become a shoujo manga artist?  Takemiya: Fundamentally, I was not suited for shoujo manga. I debuted in COM, and my dream was to draw manga that was neither shounen nor shoujo. But alas, the magazine in which I could draw my ideal manga was no more. My style didn’t have much “power” in it, so I inevitably had to choose a shoujo manga magazine. I think my art style was really uncommon at the time. But it was what it was, and I thought to myself, maybe capitalizing on that was the path I should take.  

Your works have an extraordinary depth as far shoujo manga goes... They have a unique art style...  Takemiya: It hasn’t always been like that. My shoujo manga technique was the fruit of what I have studied. It was not a result of my personal taste, nor my innate skills. Girls like that feathery, light touch. They like fine lines. But I didn’t have any of those. So, I figured drawing things girls would like a lot was my only choice. For instance, when I thought how they must like Europe at the end of the 19th century, I went on a trip as a result. I saw the real thing at its source, and did research on it.  

Then was Kaze to Ki no Uta born because you thought girls would like it?  Takemiya: That might have played into my choice of the time period the story’s set in. However, romance stories between a boy and a girl was the norm in shoujo manga at the time. You could only draw “And they lived happily ever after...” stories. And that happiness was only on the emotional level. It was normal to exclude all physical contact. But that is simply “affection.” I wanted to draw “real love.” I admit it was a little too sensational, but I thought doing it through same-sex love was the best way to go about it. That’s how I drew Kaze to Ki no Uta.  

The sex scenes between men were quite a shock for me as a little child. That’s how I learned homosexuality existed.   Takemiya: At the time, there was an official notice published by the Ministry of Education that stipulated that “You shall not draw a boy and a girl getting intimate!” However, if it was two boys, things were somehow fine... I thought I’d found a loophole! (laughs) 

These days, there are more extreme books labeled as “yaoi.” What do you think about them?  Takemiya: At the end of the day, doujinshi are doujinshi. They focus on personal enjoyment of a group. I consider myself a “craftsman,” and if I look at it from a craftsman's standpoint, I am not wholly satisfied with how they leave many things unexplained, or how they have no conclusion. At their level, I’d liked if those artists too felt more dissatisfied... If they aimed to be more conclusive. They have the talent to draw, so I’d love them to polish those skills. I’m sometimes told that it all started with “Kazeki,” and that I must take responsibility. And every time, I think to myself, “Oh... Re-really? Dit it?” (laughs) I wish someone drew something so awesome that it would blow Kazeki out of the water... 

I’d love that too! You called yourself a “craftsman,” but what exactly makes you think so?  Takemiya: I really love the word “craftsman.” I’m not interested in trying to reach an ideal of art that would not resonate with the public. I believe manga is something aimed at the general public. Otherwise, I would not consider it to have artistic value.  

Spoken like a real pro... Which brings me to Terra e... I think that’s the most widely-accepted manga of yours by the general public, and it was published in a shounen magazine. Why is it the outlier to be published in a shounen magazine?  Takemiya: I received an offer for it, but the truth is, I had always wanted to draw for a shounen magazine. That’s why accepted. But I needed to draw in the shoujo manga audience too, so I wanted the story to offer the best for both demographics. So I tried to have the concept to be that of shoujo manga, and the style to be that of shounen manga as much as possible.    

Is it different to draw for a shounen manga magazine, and a shoujo manga magazine?  Takemiya: You don’t have to hold back in shounen magazines. It fine to draw more hardcore stuff. But in shoujo magazines, that’s out of the question. There’s a trend that dictate that you should explain things in long-winded ways and spoil the reader, because girls like it when you reveal things to them through subterfuge, so don’t hit them directly with hard stuff. 

But after that, you’ve never drawn for shounen magazines which allowed you to draw as you wished.  Takemiya: Shounen magazines are mostly weekly. I cannot keep up with that. My art has fine details, so it takes me a lot of time to draw.  

Then will you be solely drawing for shoujo magazines in the future?  Takemiya: I can’t really say that I will. I’m currently working for a shoujo magazine with “Tenma no Ketsuzoku”, and with volume releases. I recently released an illustration book titled “Hermès no Michi.” I needed to base myself on documents and explain them in drawings. And they couldn’t be any kind of drawing, they needed to be interesting. Trying to come up with ways to do that was a very fun experience. So for starters, I’d like to undertake a work like that again. That kind of work I’m working on right now is a story about the fugitives of the Heike Clan in Tokushima.* 

*T/N: She is referring to “Heian Joururi Monogatari.”  

To finish our interview off, I’d like ask a question about the Year 24 Group (shoujo manga artists born around the 24th year of the Shouwa Era like Takemiya Keiko, Hagio Moto, and Ooshima Yumiko, who have influenced the shoujo manga world in the following years) which is still very prominent: Are you still conscious of it?  Takemiya: Year 24 is a thing of the past in the modern manga scene. I think it’s irrelevant now. Manga is evolving, becoming something else after being painted over continuously. I had fun when I was part of that group, but I don’t feel like dragging it out. I don’t want to cling to nice memories of the past as I work, and want to focus on how I currently think and feel. I want to do what I think is most fun at the moment.  

[ofbreathandflame-archive]

I’m curious what aspects of tamlin’s actions in acoMaF do you consider a part of his trauma response to what happened UTM and what parts do you consider just completely inconsistent writing and sjm’s feeble attempts at character assassination? Your tamlin takes are always so insightful I love everything you have to say fr 🙇‍♀️💗.

Hi anon!! This is such a great question!

A lot of people may disagree, but I genuinely don't think this is something that I can differentiate, because in my opinion, I believe the function of Tamlin's trauma from MaF onward only serves to vilify him. So, I believe that most aspects of his 'trauma' responses are meant to say something negative about him, instead of starting a conversation into the complexity of trauma. I also think its hard to even have a conversation about Tamlin's trauma as its purposely just...not elaborated on. We know what Lucien, Rhys, and Feyre partially went through UTM, but we know next to nothing about what Tamlin was subjected to UTM. The conversation just never happens.

I don't think Tamlin is meant to be elaborated on. He only accidentally has a character arc because he is consistently dealt with consequences (conflict = integral to character development). I am not saying this from a sympathetic standpoint, but a literary one: Tamlin behaves. He is reactive to the plot; he is perceived both internally and externally. What I mean is - he has semi-noble intentions, but those intentions do not always present as noble. Tamlin is interesting in the realm of the story - we do not always know how he will react, nor how others will react to him. There is more there. Rhysand, in comparison, becomes boring not because he villainous or has done bad things, but because we know how the story will frame them.

So, there are things such as his paranoia that exists, but they only serve to make him a villain, and not open up the conversation about how Amarantha's consistent spying, isolation, and cruelty might shape that paranoia; so instead of being anxious, the paranoia is Feyre centered when in my opinion, it should just be general.

In short - I don't think there a lot of genuine discussions into Tamlin's trauma. I don't think anything that happens from the point Rhys is introduced that isn't just really bad bias. Like - at some point Feyre rewrites the entirety of UTM to fit another narrative (see: he didn't craw for me - when he quite literally - and i mean literally - did). Which is fine if people fine with that type of brainless writing, but becomes quite burdensome when we're like trying to draw an analysis of character interactions, which depends not on whats told to us, but what's observed by the reader.

Thank you anon!