#intellectual exercise

[fieriframes]

[So, first, what we're gonna do is start off soaking some dried wild mushrooms -- and there is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless, and some dried shiitakes.]

[corviiids]

ok but . . . . . . . Could YOU be kira and win?!

based on how light formulated kira, it's impossible for kira to win. kira's 'new world' has no win condition - light never cleanly defines what criteria he would need to satisfy, so the new world is inherently aspirational, because deep down, light doesn't want to win at all, he just wants to play.

social reform via mass murder, especially in the way kira formulates it but really in any way, is also not only (obviously!!!) deeply, deeply unethical, it's also just fundamentally impossible for myriad reasons. again, kira can't win.

if you found the death note in real life, i would heavily advise against using it. i personally would not use it. aside from, again, the obvious ethical ramifications, it's just too fucking risky!!! the parameters of how the note functions, the potential consequences, the rules, the terms of the 'contract' you'd enter into by using it - all of these are unclear, even if you knew about death note the series. furthermore, even if you had access to the rules, which you don't, the rules explicitly state that the shinigami don't have to explain everything to you. not even the shinigami can access all the rules (only the shinigami king). and based on the a-kira short story, the rules can change and apply retroactively at any time. even if you didn't know all that, by choosing to use it, you would be submitting yourself to all sorts of unknown supernatural and non-supernatural risks. it's just not a smart thing to do. leave that shit Alone

kira is a hubris trap. the death note is designed to appeal to all the most unstable parts of a person's psyche. it's especially good at targeting one particular vulnerability in humanity, which is that people are generally much worse at considering how they would react in a hypothetical scenario than they think they are. anyone who thinks they could succeed in using the death note, even with a better formulated plan than light yagami, is falling victim to that trap.

yes

[libraryspectre]

I'm of the belief that horror for children doesn't need to be (and often isn't) less scary than horror for adults. Like any other genre, it's more about handling topics in a child-appropriate way, and maybe addressing fears that are more relevant to children than they are to adults. Horror for children can often hit just as hard as an adult, especially if you're an adult that strongly remembers what it was like to be a kid.

Take The Nest by Kenneth Oppel as an example (spoilers ahead). The main character is a young boy who has a newborn brother. There's something unspecified wrong with the baby - all he knows is that the house is tense, his parents are crying a lot, and making a lot of trips to the hospital. He's visited in his dreams by angels who offer to "fix' the baby, and he accepts, only to learn that these angels are actually wasps who are planning to eat the baby and replace him with a replica they're building in their nest. He tries to take back the offer, but the wasps don't understand why he wouldn't want a new, perfect brother to replace his sick one. In the climatic scene he's huddled in the bathroom with his baby brother as millions of wasps swarm the house.

That book is TERRIFYING. I read it at 25 and felt like my throat was closing up at some parts. Despite this, its intended audience is 8-12 year olds. Many of the fears are more relevant to children - feeling helpless in an adult world, adults not giving you complete information, a sibling taking up all of your parents' attention and energy. But this is also a book about eugenics, even if it never says so explicitly. It's a good introduction to the concept in a way kids can relate to and understand, but it's not any less horrifying as an adult. It features other things that are scary at any age, like swarms of insects, someone you love being replaced by a copy, and the extremely creepy idea that a human child could be born from a wasp nest.

That's why I love reading middle-grade horror in particular! It's a chance to reconnect with childhood fear, and the balancing act of handling serious topics in a child-appropriate way is fascinating to me. Oftentimes horror for this age group is very inventive, because there are common tropes and content that's off-limits. And every once in awhile I find something that is genuinely scary at any age. I love that.

[anghraine]

Okay, breaking my principles hiatus again for another fanfic rant despite my profound frustration w/ Tumblr currently:

I have another post and conversation on DW about this, but while pretty much my entire dash has zero patience with the overtly contemptuous Hot Fanfic Takes, I do pretty often see takes on Fanfiction's Limitations As A Form that are phrased more gently and/or academically but which rely on the same assumptions and make the same mistakes.

IMO even the gentlest, and/or most earnest, and/or most eruditely theorized takes on fanfiction as a form still suffer from one basic problem: the formal argument does not work.

I have never once seen a take on fanfiction as a form that could provide a coherent formal definition of what fanfiction is and what it is not (formal as in "related to its form" not as in "proper" or "stuffy"). Every argument I have ever seen on the strengths/weaknesses of fanfiction as a form vs original fiction relies to some extent on this lack of clarity.

Hence the inevitable "what about Shakespeare/Ovid/Wide Sargasso Sea/modern takes on ancient religious narratives/retold fairy tales/adaptation/expanded universes/etc" responses. The assumptions and assertions about fanfiction as a form in these arguments pretty much always should apply to other things based on the defining formal qualities of fanfic in these arguments ("fanfiction is fundamentally X because it re-purposes pre-existing characters and stories rather than inventing new ones" "fanfiction is fundamentally Y because it's often serialized" etc).

Yet the framing of the argument virtually always makes it clear that the generalizations about fanfic are not being applied to Real Literature. Nor can this argument account for original fics produced within a fandom context such as AO3 that are basically indistinguishable from fanfic in every way apart from lacking a canon source.

At the end of the day, I do not think fanfic is "the way it is" because of any fundamental formal qualities—after all, it shares these qualities with vast swaths of other human literature and art over thousands of years that most people would never consider fanfic. My view is that an argument about fanfic based purely on form must also apply to "non-fanfic" works that share the formal qualities brought up in the argument (these arguments never actually apply their theories to anything other than fanfic, though).

Alternately, the formal argument could provide a definition of fanfic (a formal one, not one based on judgment of merit or morality) that excludes these other kinds of works and genres. In that case, the argument would actually apply only to fanfic (as defined). But I have never seen this happen, either.

So ultimately, I think the whole formal argument about fanfic is unsalvageably flawed in practice.

Realistically, fanfiction is not the way it is because of something fundamentally derived from writing characters/settings etc you didn't originate (or serialization as some new-fangled form, lmao). Fanfiction as a category is an intrinsically modern concept resulting largely from similarly modern concepts of intellectual property and auteurship (legally and culturally) that have been so extremely normalized in many English-language media spaces (at the least) that many people do not realize these concepts are context-dependent and not universal truths.

Fanfic does not look like it does (or exist as a discrete category at all) without specifically modern legal practices (and assumptions about law that may or may not be true, like with many authorial & corporate attempts to use the possibility of legal threats to dictate terms of engagement w/ media to fandom, the Marion Zimmer Bradley myth, etc).

Fanfic does not look like it does without the broader fandom cultures and trends around it. It does not look like it does without the massive popularity of various romance genres and some very popular SF/F. It does not look like it does without any number of other social and cultural forces that are also extremely modern in the grand scheme of things.

The formal argument is just so completely ahistorical and obliviously presentist in its assumptions about art and generally incoherent that, sure, it's nicer when people present it politely, but it's still wrong.

[normalbrothers]

unrelatable and depressing type of post to the professional turbo dissociaters. sometimes the hours are just missing and i don't remember what happened throughout them. once i'm at the end of my life i'll likely say that i have only lived about 5% of it; the rest was being absent, unfocused, drifted off and wasted with daydreaming

[chamerionwrites]

A thing about being raised by conservative evangelicals is that sometimes it gives you compassion and there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-or-whatever-go-I humility and a visceral understanding that You Are Not Immune To Propaganda

And other times it makes you the judgiest motherfucker alive. Oh you don’t know any better? Because of how you were raised? Because your family/country/school/etc had an interest in selling you a particular ideology and worldview? RIP to you but I’m different

[friend-dogor]

actually wait in relation to the last post about ghibli and how it is aestheticized into bland and toothless images of comfort, it's got me thinking abt Ursula K Le Guin again

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can’t lick ’em, join ’em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold; we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy.

(from The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, 1973, top of pg.2)

i think that the original post is guilty of this to a degree, seeking to refute the idiocy and simplicity of focusing on the "happy" themes of ghibli movies my instead shifting attention to the horrors and pains contained within the text—those which could be seen as intellectual, needing perhaps a more sophisticated understanding of environmentalism and geopolitics.

but, furthermore, i think i'm guilty of it even in trying to defend miyazaki's often returning narrative commitment to hope and environmentalism and anti-war sentiment and kindness—after the last tag, i wanted to add something about "i know that putting kindness above pursuit of power feels like a baby theme for babies" because it Does, to me. "be kind" is, like, the first and simplest rule most of us are taught as children, be kind, don't hit your brother, be kind, share, be kind.

i don't refer to this as one of his more challenging themes, of course, because why should i? we all know to be kind. of course, i refer only to topics of war and environmentalism and grief as challenging. kindness is simple!

(nevermind that one of the biggest challenges for myself and a lot of people i know is how to stop being cruel to oneself after decades of practice and learned examples and instead to learn to be kind and forgiving with one's own mistakes and failures and perceived flaws)

and i wonder two things: 1) is it possible that the self-aestheticization of miyazaki's movies (for example, the rapturous visual attention paid to food, the attention paid to soft chairs, pillows, small and pleasantly cluttered environments, with plenty of natural light, lush plantlife and endearing creatures) contribute to miyazaki's more "challenging" messages, and if so, that there's a degree of success in people remembering the thick-cut bacon and eggs on toast from Howl's Moving Castle before they think of Sophie Hatter's town on fire because of the king's war? Has Hayao Miyazaki succeeded in making war and destruction at once horrifying and banal, but a simple good breakfast fascinating and compelling? ——not to say that people who simplify the movie to Only the aesthetics are right. they still aren't. they exist in dialogue with the destruction and it's ridiculous to sever the two. but is it possible that the majority of people thinking first of the "cozy" elements of Studio Ghibli's work is not nonintellectual and reductive, but rather contributes to a larger point of attention?

2) i ought to find other examples of media which do not treat "happy" themes or "light" themes—(i struggle even to talk about the category i mean without dismissing it entirely as Simple, or mischaracterizing it. i mean things like kindness over power and compassion over fear, things like that) which do not treat the themes as childish or nonintellectual, but also do so without fetishizing violence and suffering as Special and More Deserving of Thought than Simple and Stupid Good Feelings so that i can kind of investigate this concept a little more

[crooked-wasteland]

Go subscribe to Nomsy

I just found this youtuber, and I am obsessed. The emotional and mental exercise it takes to switch and commit to singular perspectives is phenomenal and this truly is the only real form of empathy in the world. He's doing this with fictional characters, inviting you to join him down a journey of psychological exploration, and it's funny and low stakes.

But the results are still real. That's empathy, not just feeling, but understanding with another. Not because you see yourself in them, but because you find them in you. This is a mixture of embodying someone you are not to feel their feelings from their perspective with some engaging storytelling abilities and dry humor.

[cctinsleybaxter]

was going to reblog the post debunking all those other posts about how crucifixion in Japanese media is insignificant imagery because 'um actually very few Japanese people are practicing catholics,' but now feel like i have to debunk the debunking post because it's insane to say there's rarely an intentional theological message- japanese people know what catholic iconography is; american movies are huge in japan, russian literature is huge in japan . what are you talking about

[eldritch-elrics]

speaking of dark souls yaoi. i'm thinking again about that genre of posts that basically implies that shipping precludes thoughtful analysis of a piece of media.. and those always annoy me because i GET it. i have read fanfics/posts that have made me think the exact same thing. at the same time..... my favorite intellectual exercise is "how much thoughtful character analysis & thematic resonance can i fit in this gay sex fanfiction" so sometimes it feels like the authors of those sorts of posts have not expanded their minds to the possibilities of what can be achieved through gay sex

[writerly-ramblings]

Deeply (Catholically) grumpy with my decision, for Lent, to exercise everyday, because I should be giving something up instead. Mildly worried (conventionally) that my life so resembles a decrepit pensioner’s that there isn’t much to renounce.

[fideidefenswhore]

Mantel says in her notes on Anne Boleyn that “no one will ever know” if she was a convinced reformer. But this is to ignore a substantial stock of evidence. We know, from her books, that she was an avid reader of the radical religious works of the day (many of them banned from England and smuggled in for her), both in French and in English. Her surviving library includes a large selection of early French evangelical works, including Marguerite de Navarre’s first published poem (“Miroir de l’âme pécheresse, 1531), which was later to be translated into English (as “Mirror of the Soul”) in 1544 by Anne’s 11 year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Anne’s library also included Jacques Lefevre d’Etaples’ French translation of the Bible, published by the same man (Martin Lempereur) responsible for publishing Tyndale’s New Testament, and numerous other French evangelical tracts. Significantly, James Carley, the curator of the books of Henry and his wives, notes that all the anti-papal literature that Henry collected supporting his break with Rome dates from after he began to pursue Anne. So it is highly likely that it was indeed she who introduced them to him.

Howard Brenton’s Revision of Our “Default” Anne, Susan Bordo

[puckpocketed]

when all you ever do is salivate over a players large frame + lament that he doesn’t throw himself around enough you gotta look at yourselves in the mirror and ask why you haven’t just got him parked net front so at least he can passively provide a screen. if ur sooo obsessed with his big boy status. idk . it’s not like he scored a bunch of goals in front of the net on the power play on the other team he played with or anything <3 and yes i AM making ten million concessions and demanding special treatment, this is MY bewretched fuckup, MY prized and delicate show horse who would spook at his own reflection and explode from a single pebble in his hoof. and i’d go to war for him !!!!!

[lesenbyan]

Like, I'm still Working On It but seeing semi verbal and ID people posting is legit Good for me as an ADHD dyslexic with memory problems and sometimes fine motor issues. Like I used to frequently just Fuck Up grammar by either rearranging words or dropping them- not to the point I couldn't be understood but enough that it Annoyed my (read: emotionally abusive) father so that I "fixed" my speech to stop getting lectured on grammar. And it always startles me that you can just. Only use the words you gotta and be understood. Even if you use the wrong version or tense of one word. Like I don't do it talking so much 'cept when tired or speech impediments poking back in, but it means I worry less when I do it when just chatting on discord. I drop a "the" or repeat a word instead of the word that grammatically goes there (i.e. the the instead of to the) or whatever and it used to be like. One of my big OCD points and I would just fucking spiral off of the smallest things. But now I can sometimes notice and not even bother to go back and fix it unless I think it confuses the sentence.

[leatherbookmark]

i know it's probably because of the strict word limit, but god i kinda hate those music reviews that go "Songtitle is a blindingly scrumptious bobble through heterochromia, splashing through lush gametophytes to bulbous spangled frocks, more like a scrimbled bimblo than a sclumpered frungle" that's very nice, a+ on thesaurus usage, but did you like the song or