#reminiscent narrative

[m-c-easton]

The Courage of Writing Nuance

One of my textbooks this semester is Words Overflown by Stars, a collection of craft essays by Vermont College MFA faculty. This week I contemplated Ellen Lesser’s essay “The Girl I Was, the Woman I Have Become: Fiction’s Reminiscent Narrators.” Specifically, she reflects on “the point in time from which the story gets told” and the purpose of placing a narrator in the present, reflecting on the…

[lotus-pear]

i love causing discourse so i want EVERYONE who sees this to comment which bsd character has the best character design and WHY. i want to see some analysis in the tags or simply why u think ur blorbo is on top in terms of fashion taste

[myuiis]

gapryong kim is like the dead wife of lookism I can’t explain it

[homostacis]

hey what if you and your twin brother were the central protagonist and antagonist of a character-action franchise and must therefore fulfill your narrative roles that inherently place you in conflict with each other

[zahri-melitor]

People really will ignore how much of Batman & Robin 2011 and Batman & Robin 2023 (and quite a bit of Robin: Son of Batman 2014) is about Bruce doing his absolute best at being a father for Damian and their developing parent-child relationship, to preference a retrospectively-implied Dick and Damian dynamic that is barely shown even in flashbacks.

(Nightwing #20 2016 conversation is sweet but pointless, it reads just as well as 'I was worried about how you and Bruce would shake down since you'd only just settled in, but everything worked out' as 'Dick wanted to adopt Damian!!!'. It can be a pleasant fantasy but also not real)

[spacedlexi]

speaking of fucked up overly hated female twdg characters i find it Super Interesting how people will say carver was the best villain in the whole series, but when lilly is literally just a successful carver (iron fist leader of a community turning children into soldiers) suddenly shes a bad/lame villain for some reason 🤔

[akkivee]

the mood is still like this pic of reol, femme fatale’s writer, in between the chuuoku seiyuu btw lmao

[leqclerc]

@f1blrcreatorsfest Week 3: Music Artist-Inspired ↳ Sebastian and Charles + songs released in 2019 Shameless / Piece Of Your Heart / You're No Good

[sage-nebula]

I'm about to start episode 15 of the Horizons anime (I was really behind), and I'd just like to say once again that the PokéAni fans that refused to watch it just because it didn't have Ash and/or the TRio in it are really, really missing out.

Aside from having gorgeous animation, music, and a fresh premise, the cast of characters in Horizons is really solid. The adults of the Rising Volt Tacklers crew (Friede, Orla, Mollie, Murdock, and Landau) are all interesting and are around just enough so that the kids are safe, but that the stakes are still raised high enough so that it's believable when the kids are in danger. Because the stakes in Horizons are genuine stakes; we are shown from the get-go that the primary antagonists, the Explorers, are not just goofy guys that can be trifled with, and they haven't come up with something they want to steal on the spot after a chance encounter, either. They are genuine threats that, at least at the point I'm watching, really are too strong for Liko and Roy to handle on their own, and so they need Friede and the rest of the RVT to help them train and become stronger. This doesn't mean that Liko and Roy are helpless and can't do anything -- they do quite a lot on their own! -- but there are stakes in the ongoing plot in this anime (and there is an ongoing, narrative plot!), and the adult crew are around just enough to help out when things get dicey for the kids, who are newbie trainers.

Liko is a really refreshing protagonist; she has a lot to learn about the world still and so is curious and ready to see and experience new things, but she's also cautious and unsure of herself and her place at first, which leads to her getting lost in her own thoughts and tripped up by her own anxiety at times. But we get to see her grow; she comes out of her shell a little more episode by episode, and seeing that marked character growth is wonderful to watch. Plus, as the primary protagonist, she's central to the ongoing narrative plot; the pendant that she inherited from her grandmother is what the Explorers are after, and she takes an active role in wanting to solve its mystery, taking the step herself to not be just a damsel needing to be protected by the RVT, but instead being the heroine of her own story (something she lampshades in an early episode lmao). She has a concrete motivation for being on this journey and stake in the plot. Liko is great!

And for everyone I've seen who says, "I miss Ash," well . . . Roy's your boy! Don't get me wrong, Roy is very much his own character and person; but Roy has a lot of the same personality beats that Ash did in the later sagas (you know, when they'd truly decided to throw out all semblance of who Ash was when he was originally conceived as a character to instead be who they wanted him to be vis-a-vis what type of shounen protagonist is popular nowadays). He's extremely energetic, loves pokémon and gets along with them readily, and is enthusiastic about seeing new places. Except this wasn't just an Ash copy-paste, because we're given concrete reasons for this, too; Roy grew up on a remote island near-ish Kanto, and never left that island for his entire life. He was always told fantastical stories about faraway adventures, but never got to experience them for himself, instead attending remote schools and spending his days otherwise playing with wild pokémon in the forests on his island. In fact, Roy grew up on one story in particular: the story of an ancient adventure who journeyed with six pokémon known as the Six Heroes, including a shiny Rayquaza, to the ends of the world. And then Roy finds an ancient pokéball containing that very Rayquaza, releases it on accident, and that gives him the motivation to join the RVT so that he can chase the Rayquaza and finally set off on a journey of his own, to solve the mystery of the ancient pokéballs and shiny Rayquaza. So again, it's a unique motivation and stake in the plot! While still, also, being a character type you're likely to enjoy, if you enjoyed the Ash who acted like a rockruff in order to train his rockruff. (Because Roy? Jumped off a rock over and over to try to teach a wattrel how to fly.)

The Horizons anime has an ongoing narrative plot that the main characters are actively engaged in and have a reason to pursue. (Because I forgot to mention, but Liko's pendant responds to Roy's ancient pokéball.) They're brand new, unique characters whose personalities are informed by their background and who grow as the episodes progress, because even the episodes that are a bit more slice of life are still informing them as characters and are progressing their characters forward. The ongoing plot is never forgotten, nor is the threat; in an episode where the crew is shopping, a merchant off-handedly mentions Amethio and his sidekicks (they're the main three Explorers that the RVT have faced so far), and Friede picked up the reference and pounced on the potential lead on what their enemies are up to, and so on. You fully believe that the adult crew of the RVT has known each other forever, and they're so warm and kind to Liko and Roy when they join the crew. Not to mention Dot, Murdock's niece, who is also absolutely delightful and I can't wait to see more of her.

All in all, I cannot stress this enough, if there are any fans of the Ash anime that still haven't checked out Horizons because they feel it won't be the same . . . well, it's not the same. But it's really, really, REALLY good. And you're really missing out on something great if you continue to pass it up.

[alexjcrowley]

My mind has been plagued by vision again I can't stop listening to (The Legend of) Miss Baltimore Crabs without thinking of Nico Rosberg

[shorthaltsjester]

something something laura bailey true love’s crits the campaign one nat 20 was vex’s plead for percy not to leave her but the campaign three reroll nat 1 was imogen’s adamance that she won’t leave laudna

[orcelito]

Shino raising his dead friends and friend's dog from the dead with the power of bugs as one friend's cousin watches [not clickbait]

[dukeofriven]

The Mandlorian decided that droids needed a bar, because every Star Wars writer has made the moral black pit of droid sentience and servitude ever more incoherent, absurd, and irreconcilable. (The short version is that droids in Star Wars can fundamentally not be sentient for the ironclad non-diegetic reason in that its moral framework cannot handle the weight that every organic character in Star Wars is at-best totally indifferent to slavery and has casually and comfortably bought slaves, sold slaves, murdered slaves, ripped bits out of some slaves to improve other slaves, left slaves to die, ordered slaves to their death to save their own skins, and watched other people murder slaves without any reaction either personally or within any kind of larger narrative awareness. Stupid writers keep dancing towards the issue because they think it adds 'depth' or some kind of 'edginess' but no, it just breaks Star Wars. Seriously, if droids are fully people Star Wars just... breaks. In a way that's really obnoxious, too, like that one asshole who corners you at a party to tell you that the Jedi are the REAL villains if you think about it. No, dipshit, they're not: even Andor understands that the moral line in Star Wars is really obvious and solid. Star Wars morality can encompass people doing bad things in pursuit of a noble goal, but it never goes 'fascists and anti-fascists are a mirror image' because that's authoritarian-friendly centrist bullshit.

[sidebar: Andor understands that's there's nuance to freedom fighting, that terror can be a tool to fight oppression but, equally, that an anti-fascist who turns to fascism to fight fascism is just a fascist. The tension in Andor is not that fighting fascism will turn you fascist, but that the choices you make might free others but leave you forever chained. You might bring your people to the promised land, but there's no guarantee you'll be able to join them because a moral person who holds themselves to their own moral standard values himself too much to live comfortably with what he's done. Luthen Rael doesn't think the things he are does are justified because of the greater good: he thinks that he couldn't see a better option and he will live every day until he dies questioning, re-litigating, and self-flagellating himself that he wasn't good enough to figure that better option out, and nothing or no-one will ever free him from that guilt and shame. A fascist and an anti-fascist can both do terrible things but its the fascist who can sleep well at night, and that's all the difference in the world. Andor's a pretty good show, y'all.] Thus, as the Empire is explicitly pro-slavery, you can't have the Good Guys also be pro-[droid] slavery as some kind of 'both sides' tu quoque rhetorical flourish. It doesn't work—not in Star Wars. Not even in mildly more amture, grown-up Star Wars/ Droids cannot be sentient in Star Wars because literally the entire moral underpinning that is the narrative raison d'etre of the entire series falls completely apart. (This is, incidentally, the non-mechanical reason I don't like droid PCs in my SW campaigns.) And yes, this is the short version of this argument. The long version involves me whacking you with a pool noodle while reading long passages of Uberto Eco and CLR James until you stop trying to make Star Wars 'edgy' like someone writing an 'evil Santa' movie.)

[always-a-joyful-note]

I love Crossroads for the simple fact that it's basically slapping you with an illustration of how easily humans can change and how fragile even the strongest of them are deep inside but framing it as two high schoolers getting a metaphorical divorce. And even that I can't really make fun of because Rei and Keito were both lowkey screaming out to the other for help that the other couldn't give (Rei just wanting some peace, someone to actually look at him as an equal, but instead deciding to betray Keito; Keito sincerely just wanting to help out a friend and make the school better but being manipulative about it). And I really am glad it cut to the present to show that they eventually found the people that they needed back then, even if it took a while for the relationship as a whole to get there.

[thegoldenhoof]

Izzy and Bury Your Gays: The Amatonormative angle

This is mostly a thought that has emerged in attempting to write a response to the conversation happening on mottlemoth’s post about Bury Your Gays but I realized I was trying to articulate an idea that needed more than me typing on my phone during lunch at work

This takes a rather meandering path to my conclusion but I wrote it this way to show what my thought process was.

https://www.tumblr.com/ramblingruminations/732751632764403712/to-me-ofmd-works-because-the-revenge-is-an-entity?source=share&ref=ramblingruminations

[aroaessidhe]

2023 reads // twitter thread    

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries

a female professor from Cambridge visiting a wintery town in the far north with her old dog to study the local fey for her encyclopedia

her colleague shows up despite her protests, managing to charm the local townsfolk

in the form of journal entries

interesting fey, field trips, grumpy romance