#please read actual books!!!

[kainebell]

ohhhh my god you think Valax is a “half-assed imitation” of Aerin? You think she “couldn’t be a bigger Aerin wannabe if she tried”? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite Andrew Shvarts?

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[ajthecrocodile]

Shattered, broken, not yet dead

I’m fine

*starts bawling my eyes out*

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Why would you—That's not—I just wanted to ask for help, why did you have to go and make it awkward???

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[and-fishing-equipment]

genuinely my favorite thing about louis is the atrocities. he's cute and all and he's funny and kind sometimes but also...... he makes terrible decisions, hurts others and himself, is arrogant and avoidant and has depression as well as terrible taste in men. he frequently manipulates himself and others without even meaning to and the lies he's told himself about his own life have influenced him so greatly that he can't even recount events from his own life without unintentionally twisting them to show him in the position that is most cathartic for him to talk about. through all of this i still love him unconditionally. it's such an interesting character concept. what if your protagonist and narrator was so unreliable and whiny and biased all the time but you're hearing a nuanced portrait of his feelings as he made all these dumb as hell decisions. would you still sympathize with him? could you do it?

[bri-cheeses]

personally I think that all queer books should have a “special edition” with a subtle cover (and a code name if it’s necessary) for all of the people in homophobic areas

[tangramkey]

i love my Basketbot Portal AU

[subconscious-deactivated20230229]

If anyone out there sees my blog, no the fuck you don’t.

[coquelicoq]

as a huge unreliable narrator enjoyer i love the fact that the raven tower is narrated by someone who cannot lie. so the narration is not unreliable, and any kind of uncertainty is always couched in "here is a story i have heard" or "i imagine", but it scratches the same itch as unreliable narration because the evidentiality of the narration is still so central, just in the opposite way. stories that don't care about where the narrator is getting their information or what biases are present in the way that information is shared with us are on one end of a spectrum, and stories that do care about those things are on the other end, and the raven tower is firmly situated alongside the unreliably narrated stories even though the whole point is that the narrator is as motivated as it is possible to be to never say something that is untrue. and it's fascinating to see how ann leckie manages to build suspense and subvert expectations without really at any point deliberately misleading the reader. every time i reread one of her books, the bouncing of the dvd screensaver in my brain gets a little more frenetic. how does she do what she does. ann leckie what is your secret.

[lockedtombmemes]

[werewolfetone]

Funniest error ever in historical fiction TO ME as someone who is rlly into 18th century history is when an author obviously thinks "breeches" is just a fancy antiquated word for trousers. why are the breeches of a character in this book set in 1845 I'm reading allegedly brushing the tops of his shoes rn

[punkeropercyjackson]

"The Pjo show is bad because it has a lot of pop culture references and that's so fucking cringe!!!"Omg pop culture references in Percy Jackson?????Fork spotted in a kitchen momence!!!!!

[dykevanny]

Sorry the mimic just fucking sucks

[lizziestudieshistory]

Someone send help, this is my "currently reading" pile and I'm fearful it's going to topple over if I keep going at this rate! Worst part is this isn't a complete picture of how out of control I am because I'm reading two fantasy books on my Kobo!

[brother-emperors]

WHAT DOOM FOR YOU?

back again with my Please Read The Thebaid Agenda! I adapted the ending of Book VII into a comic because oh boy. thoughts thoughts thoughts.

There is a horror in having yourself altered to such a degree where you are unrecognizable in your own self, to know that it is happening, to know that you should be dead and yet you are not. You have already seen the moment of your death!!!! (Stat. Theb. 3.537 – 47) There's a horror in knowing, and in it being treated as an act of love when it's really more like a violation. Amphiaraus is spared Creon's decree, but by falling into the underworld, it makes things worse on a cosmic scale.

Statius' Thebaid Book VII, trans. Jane Wilson Joyce

Statius and Virgil: The Thebaid and the Reinterpretation of the Aeneid, Randall T. Ganiban

Statius' Thebaid and the Poetics of Civil War, Charles McNelis

The Perils of Prophecy: Statius' Amphiaraus and His Literary Antecedents, E. Fantham

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[kwillow]

This thought kept occuring to me but I finally realized that Theo reminds me a bit of Stuart Ullman from The Shining (the novel version)

Stuart Ullman (novel version) is not a character one would usually think to make a reference towards and I love you for that. I completely see your vision from this first paragraph.

This too. Theo IS a bit of a bastard. Thank god he's a broke hermit NEET so he doesn't have any employees who have to deal with him.