#im into essays and academic writing

[daubigny-stan]

there's this fanfiction that I'm super obsessed over that will never be finished. it's Catch Perfect by the (in?)famous George Devalier. yes it's a Hetalia fanfic please shame me, it's probably my subconscious reason for taking geography in college. anyways this fic... god I would give the world to see it finished. many praise Devalier's veraverse fics as his finest works but this one for some reason is so special to me.

I think what's so special about this fic to me is how sincere it feels? how real it feels? the veraverse series was the author's interpretation, their assumption about how gay couples in europe would be like in WW2 - obviously they weren't there for the actual thing. but his modern AU fics feel... tangible. a real "write what you know" situation. the author was probably a young, gay man who was into romcom, you could really feel that he wrote from his own experiences, from people he knew (although he never explicitly said anything about himself, geogre devalier is notoriously mysterious even as one of the most fanous hetalia fandom figures).

and when you read this fic, analogizing it to let's say a half eaten corpse, only part of the body is whole. but you can see the bones of it! every chapter is titled after poker terminology and strategy, and they kind of link to each of the main character's personalities and you could guess that they potentially foreshadow something. you could tell which body part went where! and it kills you even more because you want to see so bad what the whole body looked like. you are able to tell where the arc is going, probably figure out that it'll have a happy, cheesy ending like his other modern AU fics but you want to hear geogre write about it so bad.

it's about human!Sweden, a tapped out poker player who is forced to move into a student sharehouse (with the rest of the Scandinavia gang) because he lost his entire everything on poker (he is also the age of a uni student, but he doesn't go to uni). and it's this fic about 5 gay guys (and 2 other guys) living in one house and hijinks ensue, mostly around their own crazy personalities. i love how gay it is, it isn't just some "they just happened to be gay" or being gay is just not a thing that's just there in the world. there's these hints of homophobia as experienced by these men in the 2000s (presumably), there's the gay culture written out, it's just a real treat to read. if i had the time and energy i would research poker just so i could finish the fic for myself even though that wouldn't be enough because i know anything i write will be leagues below devalier

[rookflower]

on one hand yeah this is the kitty cat book fandom where at least 95% of the people here are just here to draw funny cats or for nostalgia reasons and it's really not that deep, there is nothing wrong with taking a critical backseat on this one. but on the other, the amount of people in the fandom who seem to genuinely believe that children's literature and xenofiction are both somehow inherently unworthy of any form of criticism whatsoever, to the point where random tumblr posts casually identifying shit like.... themes.... and narrative trends... is looking into things way too deeply and makes you a bad or stupid person in some way because "they're just cats", gives the literature student in me such a headache

[lorephobic]

literally nobody asked for it, but here's my list of saltburn essays that i've slowly been drafting over the course of the last week which WILL be required reading for anybody trying to engage with me about this movie. my very personal saltburn 101 syllabus just dropped

A Wolf in Deer's Clothing: Saltburn's Attempt at Innocence

an examination of party costumes and our character's last attempts to masquerade as something they're not: felix—an angel, all-forgiving and all-knowing, something to be worshiped; and oliver—a prey animal, prey to class-divide, prey to saltburn, prey to felix.

thoughts about oliver specifically are loosely organized in my #bambi tag

A Midsummer Night's Mare: Farleigh Start as the Ultimate Victim of Saltburn

a farleigh character study, about the ways he was mistreated and manipulated at saltburn, about fighting to stay alive and the scars left behind by knowing when to give in

alternatively titled "QuickStart", may be adapted into a conclusive essay specifically focusing on oliver and farleigh's relationship

The Eye of the Beholder: On Saltburn's Voyeurism & Violence [working title]

how wealth and class pushes the catton's toward the volatile reality of being able to look, but not touch. on desire and the lack thereof, and portraying yourself as an object to be desired

may end up as two separate essays on wealth and aestheticism but i'm pushing toward a conclusive essay about the intersection of the two, which i feel is at the heart of saltburn

alternatively titled "Poor Man's Pudding: A Melvillian Approach to Saltburn's Class", again, may be adapted into it's own essay

Gender-Fluid: A Study in Sexuality and Saltburn's Desire to be Dry

a deep dive into the bodily fluids of saltburn and how oliver upsets the standard of men who are just so lovely and dry. on the creative choice to lean into the messy wetness of sex and desire and the audience's instinct toward repulsion

a celebration of the grotesque and an examination of why we would label it as such

least developed of the four, heavily inspired by @charnelpit's lovely post about the fluids in saltburn

if anybody is actually interested in any of these, i can work toward something closer to a finished piece instead of just bullet points and quotes in a google doc, but mostly this is so i can share my very brief takes on a multitude of themes in saltburn that have been haunting me

edit for people seeing this in the future: all posts about my essays are being organized into my #saltburn 101 tag if you’re interested in following these through to development!

[chiquilines]

Yeah yeah genderswap kiribaku are getting me through the week what about it

[gun-chucks]

HI, I WOULD BE VERY INTERESTED TO READ YOUR PAPER (when its finished i mean. hope its going well, i wish you the smooth writing flow of a wordsmith and many easily accessible relevant references)

so! sorry this took forever but the paper is done and has been done since may- here u go

[discobrainrot]

Do you think Kim would have danced with Eyes?

Kim is a man who takes his job seriously. He jokes with the player (re: "Do-eth thou also thorough inventories?" and "Daba-doop-doop-dead" interactions), but that doesn't erase his dedication. He hates pinball but trained for nine months to be a champion to crack a case. Regardless of the more complex moral questions about his commitment to the RCM and real-world philosophies for/against policing, he is devoted.

Was Eyes just as duty-bound? Was he straight-laced? Was Kim the loose canon between them? Would Eyes have joked around using police codes?

If you convince Kim to dance in the church, you can tell him it's a "Code 31 Emergency." He'll question how you're dancing on a busted leg if you've already done the tribunal. But he doesn't stop you. You can tell him you're undercover or that you "have become dance, destroyer of worlds." No matter what you say to him, he just says:

KIM KITSURAGI - "Good for you!" He looks around the church hall. "Rock on, then..."

You can tell him the Code 31 Emergency is "not enough Kim [on the dance floor]." A passive Suggestion check reveals that hearing you say that cheers him up. He smiles.

Did Eyes make him smile? Did he go to great lengths just for a sidelong smirk? Did he want to cheer Kim up on his worst days? Or was he content with a partner who felt a grim sense of obligation to Revachol and her people?

If you pass the next red check, you can either pull rank on him or tell him that he'll face a disciplinary hearing if he doesn't dance. When he does dance, if you've already done the tribunal and have high enough Esprit De Corps, you get the following insight:

ESPRIT DE CORPS - Part of him is amazed you're both able to just *dance* after all these horrifying events in Martinaise.

Is he amazed because, despite it all, there's joy here? Is he stunned because he never would have done it before, especially after the events preceding it? Does it remind him of a partner he lost? In the days after, does he ask himself what's different this time?

Do you think Eyes would have danced with Kim?

[bmpmp3]

sorry to be a bit of a hater but i do wish youtubers weren't so scared of making their videos just like, "reviews", whys everything gotta be a "video essay" all the time. every day my recommendations are filled with 40 minute videos titled "_____: An Underrated Masterpiece" where the first like five minutes are reading the wikipedia definition of "masterpiece" in a somber voice with dramatic themed text on screen. please just tell me how good or bad you think something is and use the rest of the runtime to explain why. you dont need to put on all these airs

[fruitsofhell]

Writing my college application essay VS writing a 1000 word essay on how I and the fandom interpret Meta Knight's character in the games

[soldier-poet-king]

Got asked for my professional opinion today on a complex legal issue by a much senior coworker 😭🥺 on the basis of my response, i got asked to join in on a meeting with some higher ups to explain what I had explained to said coworker 😭🥺 I am going to get a good grade in Career and Being Smart, something that is both normal to want and possible to achieve

[atlas-affogato]

Lowkey convinced I could have been one of those autistic child prodigies if I didn't also have adhd

[thedeafprophet]

Being in writing classes has reminded me how much I crave academic approval oh no

[oncie]

why clive is THE ‘tumblr sexyman’ of the professor layton fandom; a short thesis written at 5am.

“descole fits sexyman tropes more than clive does” no he doesn’t. look at my url. this is coming from someone with a long long background of once-ler fandom and sexyman studies (and terrorising the pl fandom with clive/once-ler ship art LOL). SO. im educated in this matter is what im saying. the once-ler, AKA the ORIGINAL tumblr sexyman, SHAPED an entire generation and put the term tumblr sexyman in the internet vernacular which also made this whole competition exist in the first place so you better show some RESPECT to that man’s name.

clive’s polarising personalities: outwardly charming and friendly (future luke), inwardly malicious and spiteful (clive). his story arc: his selfishness and delusion leading to irredeemable destruction followed by his commitment to atonement even if it meant his lifelong imprisonment. he’s even got a weird kind of father figure in his story who tries to save him from himself. and then how the fandom that sprouted up around him was a microcosmic version of the once-ler response: some skinny white villain in a suit who was barely even the main character of their own media, their SINGLE piece of media (not counting precious versions of the same story here re:the lorax), suddenly taking an internet collective by storm to a surprising degree and giving impetus to a fandom-wide legacy of fame and infamy for said character. you see this in the fandom response to clive even today in 2022. look in his tag; you will either get people passionately devoted to him or people who passionately hate him for the chaos he wrought upon a community and also the general annoyance of seeing his face everywhere unjustified for the amount of media he actually was present in. THAT’S the once-ler response.

descole, on the other hand, has been a largely well received character after his four media appearances. you either get people passionately devoted to him or people lukewarm on him. people don’t complain of fatigue and annoyance at seeing descole’s face everywhere, because his appearances in the entire prequel series justifies his popularity. yes, descole fits some of the aforementioned tropes mentioned: namely the polarised personality, the suit, the villainy, tragic backstory. but the term tumblr sexyman is not solely rooted in tropes; it is equal part trope and equal part fandom meta. the term itself was coined by not the fans, but the critics; those in response to the once-ler fandom  who had grown fatigued by tumblr’s affinity towards the same flavour of charismatic villain in a suit. when you think of the phrase “i want that twink obliterated” and the people who genuinely mean it, which is the professor layton character that springs to mind first? it’s probably not descole.

a slight digression, but it’d also be wrong to write about the once-ler response without a mention of the absolute avalanche of once-ler OCs and askblogs that unexpectedly flooded out of that ONE kids’ movie. an entire fandom UNIVERSE was made from literal scraps (seriously have you seen the lorax 2012 the once-ler is barely fucking IN IT). these scraps AKA missing information about a character led fans to compensate by filling in the gaps which is what ended up birthing the infamous oncest ship - in its essence, a response to the largely unexplained and sudden jump from ‘nice once-ler’ to ‘bad once-ler’. this was what created a literal ‘once-ler fandom’ as opposed to ‘lorax fandom’. ANYWAY. this is a digression because neither clive nor descole had a ‘clive/descole fandom’ of their own (sadly) and selfcest was not a defining feature of their respective eras (thankfully). but that’s not why i raise this point. i do because THIS was the phenomenon that truly allowed the term ‘tumblr sexyman’ to come to fruition. it was a marker of not only just fatigue, but cringe. 

CRINGE is an important and defining factor to what TRULY makes a tumblr sexyman, and those in the tags this past week dunking on clive for being embarrassing and wearing kneesocks and being ‘the sexyman of the past’ (AKA a teen girl’s crush) is only proving it. that thirst that brought about the once-ler fandom from literal scraps was created by the most important demographic in internet history: neurodivergent teenagers circa 2007-2014. THIS was the one demographic with the POWER to make the most unexpected characters and media popular with their sheer passion and creativity, and yet the characters and media loved by this era specifically became the first subjects of cringe culture. cringe culture itself is a topic for another day; why it matters here is that there is an unmistakable element of cringe today surrounding clive as a character most of all. there are far too many examples of this to count but see this post for one example. this one post is really important because OP really gets it; the insane fandom response to one unlikely character, the main era of his popularity (cited 2013), and a question of cringe from a 2022 fandom perspective - why DID he inspire such lust and loathing when he looks like that? it’s because the neurodivergent teenagers wished it so, and thus it came to be. 

to most people, thanks to current tumblr’s over-categorisation of the term in an attempt to “cringe” at its past in a self-aware manner, “tumblr sexyman” has been watered down to mean “any character conventionally attractive and popular enough who sometimes skews towards the morally grey.” seriously, look at that sexypedia wiki, there are hundreds of these characters now. ANYONE qualifies if they had a sad backstory and had a reasonable fandom following. but this is only a cheap imitation of what the term really means. a majority of these characters haven’t actually earned what truly makes a “tumblr sexyman”, which ultimately boils down to the factors of tropes, unlikely fandom response, and their following notoriety based in cringe culture. in only a short time, we are forgetting the history. we’re forgetting where this phenomenon came from, WHO it came from, and how this essentially defined an entire era of the internet.

anyway im going to bed so what i’m saying is that voting clive represents and respects what the term “tumblr sexyman” really, actually means at its core and origin, because in the end, the character has earned it. descole on the other hand may very well be the ‘sexyman of the modern age’ - a cheap, watered down imitation only replicated by those who have forgotten their internet history.

[2x4swrites]

reposting this because I originally linked it in a reblog chain on @borom1r + I’m very happy with it:

a little over 5k words of wedding & sword exchange fluff with Éomer and Faramir, because I love iron-age Norse culture and the parallels that can be drawn between it & Rohan 💚

(link in notes)

[daydreamycrustacean]

watching hbomb's video is giving me hives bc being in college it has been drilled into me SO MANY TIMES that if you write an essay or something and you take someone's words and you don't quote or source them you are in deep shit. It's like. Ooooh god these people (james whatshisname) have neve written essays in their life. They have never felt the pain.

[lonely-night]

every time I think of a headcanon and I have such a good time brainrotting by myself but then I realise I really miss brainrotting with others and I'm sad again

[ruffgem]

a lot of my teachers this year have randomly complimented me on my writing even when the class largely has nothing to do with it and tbh??!??! it's really nice and it makes me want to write more?!?!?!!?!?!