#so very fascinating to me

[naivety]

in my black sails rewatch, i was tempted to say i was noticing a pattern of two kinds of characters in it, but as i continue to watch i think there are mainly three. three, but two of them take up the most room, and they are the storytellers, and the characters in the story they're telling. the third is the audience, and it's the place we see the most intimacy in. it is a role associated with being an audience to a truth, not a story. it's bearing witness to someone once they trust you with their truth in place of whatever story they tell for everyone else.

when silver first meets flint, he clocks him as our main storyteller right away but it's not until he directly cues flint he can see straight through it that flint pays him any attention at all. silver doesn't see his storyteller status because he's a character becoming self aware, like gates, or even billy, or because he yet loves flint enough to be his true audience, like miranda, but because silver's a storyteller too. gates is too smart not to be aware he's in a story, but he can't quite breach the containment of character into storyteller. they have just enough awareness to judge the story, but not to escape it, while someone like miranda, who plays the role of audience, sees through the narrative enough not to judge it, but to love it. for it's honest truth alone, not for it's ability to tell a compelling story. she loves it enough to want to live it, not tell it. she loves flint the man, not the storyteller, and yet he is a storyteller, and so she loves him too much to end it either. almost, when flint is willing to cede his storyteller status himself, for her, who he loves in return. however brief it lasted, almost.

after flint kills gates, he starts becoming too self aware to continue, he becomes aware that he too is a character in it and he's the villain. he becomes aware of the story and so it must come to an end, as stories eventually must from the audience's perspective. for the audience, there is no way out for a character like him, and he's too aware of which character he is. in the moment he kills gates, he becomes him; sees the story being told and his role in it, and that it's a story he doesn't want to be a part of, not in that role. there's no way out for that role. little does he know, it remains true even after he rescinds the awareness to become storyteller again. there's no way out for him anymore, not in that state. then silver walks in. and he sees not flint's story but flint's truth, crying over a man he just killed because he hates his character, hates being that character, and silver reacts not like another character, not like the audience, but like a storyteller too. he offers him the way out, and the next we see flint, he is walking back out on deck, and he is telling a story again.

i didn't even see the significance of this kinship on my first watch, how even a match it is, and how not just important that moment was for the story, of course, but how intimate for both silver and flint. it's the first scene that establishes their equality in the narrative to each other. fellow storytellers now telling a joint story, and because of it, it starts to become a story only both of them together can tell. if one loses the other in the finale of season one or the premiere of season two, the story would end. they need each other because they are equals, both refusing to let their story end against all odds.

which is why i also believe flint genuinely lost silver's respect after he lost his leg! silver's decision to protect the men had nothing to do with telling a story, he was subject to one. he wanted to be a part of the crew and that story, he wanted to live it, and the crew are just characters to flint. for a moment, he let someone else write his story. silver, as we later find out, lives life uninterested in joining stories, but telling different ones of his own, one after the other. until flint's crew. until flint! flint had him there too. he wants to be a part of that story because it's the first time in maybe forever he's felt like he could be a part of something, not just see the parts and create more favorable shapes to survive in. he is a storyteller by necessity, not an artist. it's just as likely flint loses respect for silver after the season two finale because he suspects silver backed out of their joint narrative to start telling a different one, one in which flint is just another character to right off and no longer an equal to write with. either way, it's not until silver rescinds that threat and flint believes in silver's desire to keep writing a story with him that they see eye to eye again.

it's not until they genuinely care about each other that flint lets silver see the truth of him, not just his story, and it shifts their balance of power immediately. flint gives up his storyteller position for silver and silver alone, to tell him about thomas. it is no story, it is just the truth only miranda had ever born witness to, and he tells it to him! and silver can't do the same in return. he can't be an even match to that, he can't be an equal to it. whatever his truth is, he can't tell it. he offered himself as flint's audience and flint accepted the vulnerability and offered to be silver's audience in return, but in silver's own words, there is no story to tell. the narrative falls apart for him as soon as he tries to make enough sense of it to speak out loud to someone. he can't speak of it without giving up the position of power as storyteller. he refuses flint that intimacy of stepping out of the story with him, he refuses it even to madi. the closest intimacy he can offer is to write a story in which he can pretend he's just a character in it existing alongside them. a character who loves them.

by the end of the show, silver must pretend he is more like gates and less like miranda in order to end the story. gates was at one point one of the biggest threats to flint's narrative throughout because his self awareness as a character in a story he didn't like threatened the story being told at all. the self awareness of being a character threatens to kill the story altogether, just as the self awareness of being an audience threatens to end a story for the sake of letting truth be a fact, not something to convince everyone else of, which is why both gates and miranda are killed for the story to continue. you need the mutual agreement to suspend your belief, and gates' struggle is that he couldn't make peace with that and still be in the story which is why it becomes his end, just as miranda loved the storyteller too much to not either be its end or be ended by it herself. silver, on the other hand, as a storyteller himself, knows how to be both. furthermore, he loves flint enough to try. especially if he thinks it will save madi's life. as much as flint changes to him throughout the show, he can't give up his storyteller position either, not even to just live it. so silver tells one final story, and it's the last chapter of flint's. he ends it and himself as the author, and becomes a character he is himself constantly in the process of writing. a character to himself. he becomes all three; storyteller, character, and audience. but then again, isn't that what he always was from the start?

[koipepo]

That omake of little Kabru not being able to show off his howetown sweets because of Misril gets to me a lot so...

Here's a happier Kabru (and Lairu)

[a-dope-fiend]

It irritates me alot when people say that making medic more compassionate is ''missing the point of his character'' when he is literally shown to be in the comics.... did you miss the part where he showed concern for both sniper and miss pauling's well being in comic 5 and 6.

His actions are a combination of genuine attachment + clinical interest and these things do not cancel out one another. He is always pushing boundaries and going against the grain and i think this is what led to him losing his license in the first place. He felt stifled by the rules imposed on him.

He is shown to be extremely passionate so it makes sense that he would use his endless fascination with medicine as a way to show his affection. He loves his friends so he will find a way to make them borderline indestructible. Malpractice is his love language.

[yrsonpurpose]

Acting a fool? I was pretty young.

[sammygender]

girlcoded sam readings are like. his arcs are so tied up with control and bodily autonomy and sexual assault and otherness and cleanness and a desire for freedom and rebellion against oppressive masculine forces to the point where an examination of his show-long arcs looks like a thesis on The Female Gothic. he’s never afforded the respect or the power of characters like john and dean and is in fact narratively punished whenever he isn’t subservient to them. both the show itself and the fandom surrounding it treat him like dean’s bitch wife. he is textually compared to female characters multiple times, by the narrative and by dean.

and then meanwhile girlcoded dean readings are like. Eldest daughter core! (his father handed down ultimate control over every aspect of sam’s life once he died like a family heirloom)(he is THE patriarch). Yes he does the cooking yes he does the cleaning (which he doesn’t even…. and even if he solely did all the housework how does that make him Girl Coded unless it’s being delegated exclusively to him like its his role and he’s punished for not conforming to it… which is not happening…).

like girlcoded dean readings rely on stereotypes about women in real life. girlcoded sam readings rely on noticing how much the narrative constructed around sam falls into tropes used in fiction almost always about women. even things like his psychic powers! the way people are always swarming around trying to ‘corrupt’ him! the fixation on his purity and innocence! the two readings are very different things

[seefasterdraws]

from the homumiko mines

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Lackadaisy Enrichment

[maomango-doodle]

Reclaiming identity, rewriting duty

a comic for Chrome's birthday

[fictionadventurer]

Maybe the problem with Christian fiction is that it's non-denominational. People are just "Christian", with no effort put into showing what practicing that religion looks like for them specifically. No indication that there are other Christians who could have different beliefs. No wrestling with differing ideas and the struggle of how one should live out their Christian faith. And that makes it unrealistic and unrelatable.

[lady-raziel]

hate to put anything about JK Rowling on your dash but I saw this post and immediately thought about how much of Rowling’s future ideology was foreshadowed in Harry Potter looking back and how much the really shitty things both the “good” and “bad” characters do are all totally reflections of herself…

Like I was specifically thinking about how much Dumbledore’s insistence on calling Voldemort by his birth name bothered me more and more growing up…and now it’s like oh my god duh it was because Dumbledore was literally deadnaming him because using a person’s chosen name (and by extension, pronouns!!) is something that Rowling thinks should be a privilege you receive if someone respects you that can be instantly taken away if you are “bad” and not worthy of respect

Dumbledore refusing to call Voldemort by his chosen name and calling him “Tom” instead (and keep in mind how Voldemort willingly changed his body to a form he was more comfortable with) was literally just thinly-veiled transphobia wasn’t it and the only reason Voldemort isn’t explicitly trans is because Rowling wrote these books in the early 2000s and Voldemort probably IS a trans woman but the whole damn time she’s being misgendered by an unreliable narrator

[salt-n-salt]

SHARVEY? on MY BLOG?

[agardenintheshire]

tolkien (a studied linguist) and me (has taken their fair share of linguistic classes) staring at each other after the narrator casually drops that the hobbits just 'forgot' their languages and simply adopted the common speech as if that is a normal thing that happens out of the blue and isn't connected to at best cultural assimilation and at worst colonialism, imperialism, and oppression

[blueskittlesart]

*sigh* thoughts on Nintendo's botw/totk timeline shenanigans and tomfoolery?

tbh. my maybe-unpopular opinion is that the timeline is only important when a game's place on the timeline seriously informs the way their narrative progresses. the problem is that before botw we almost NEVER got games where it didn't matter. it matters for skyward sword because it's the beginning, and it matters for tp/ww/alttp (and their respective sequels) because the choices the hero of time makes explicitly inform the narrative of those games in one way or another. it matters which timeline we're in for those games because these cycles we're seeing are close enough to oot's cycle that they're still feeling the effects of his choices. botw, however, takes place at minimum 10 thousand years after oot, so its place on the timeline actually functionally means nothing. botw is completely divorced from the hero of time & his story, so what he does is a nonissue in the context of botw link and zelda's story. thus, which timeline botw happens in is a nonissue. honestly I kind of liked the idea that it happened in all of them. i think there's a cool idea of inevitability that can be played with there. but the point is that the timeline exists to enhance and fill in the lore of games that need it, and botw/totk don't really need it because the devs finally realized they could make a game without the hero of time in it.

[mapletine]

yeehaw 🤠

[thermodynamic-comedian]

imagine ianthe's suffering rn. its so funny to me. girl all u wanted was power and i respect that but turns out that the side effect of power isnt the moral implications or whatever, its dealing with god's personal drama.

[eliotquillon]

i think a lot about john and ian and their strange, implicit estrangement. it is never explicitly addressed but it is there. blunt going out of his way to say that ian was a good agent but john was a better one. alex always being compared to john despite ian being the man who raised him. ian never telling alex anything about his parents. john never sparing a thought for ian in the snakehead coda. ash being chosen to be the best man at john's wedding and alex's godfather instead of ian. ian being recruited to mi6 straight out of university while john went military and none of it mattering in the end because it was still john who was chosen for the scorpia mission, john who died the hero, john who got blown up and martyred while ian's own death barely registered. you're twentysomething years old and your older brother has just been murdered after being better than you at the one thing you are defined by and you will spend fourteen years raising his son, and none of it will matter. here's a question: why does ian hate being called 'uncle' so much? here's another: can you still be an uncle without a brother?