#straightforward structure

[oldshrewsburyian]

The shrapnel in his body was a metaphor, but I understood that only many, many years later.

Fox, Dubravka Ugresic

[transsextual]

beautiful sunny day today ^-^

[deadgit]

My favorite advice for creating complex characters is to give them deeply ingrained contradictions.

Which explains how both Lister and Rimmer manage to be such compelling characters in such a ridiculous show lol

[essektheylyss]

I put on the Empire Sibling Mighty Vibes for the first time in a while in honor of the first day of class and can we please have more Mighty Vibes. I'm begging. I love them so much.

[dilfslayer1080p]

shoutout to @octoyanko for showing me the true power of AI I'm gonna lose sleep over this shit

[daisyachain]

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

[individuating]

my #truth:

ep 1 = ep 7 (beatriceless)

ep 2 = ep 6 (furniture)

ep 3 = ep 5 (tools)

ep 4 = ep 8 (ange focus)

[perdvivly]

The most recent chess drama involves Tallulah Roberts receiving the WCM title (woman candidate master) after a scoring 4/10 at the Women’s Chess Olympiad.

FIDE say that you can receive the CM or WCM titles for scoring 3.5/7 at a Chess Olympiad or when you reach the rating of 2200 and 2000 respectively.

She beat an 1100 rated player and a 1780 rated player. She drew with three players rated 1200, 1400, and 1800. Which earned her the 3.5/7 needed for the title.

A lot of people are reading this as “women’s titles are meaningless”. I don’t think that’s a particularly fair reading of the situation and I don’t know why gender is being brought into it. The way I read this is that the 2000 criteria and the 3.5/7 criteria are not well balanced.

[smute]

Molly McGhee, Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind

[rubbertplant]

I enjoy bela lugosi's dead as much as the next goth enjoyer but it grinds my gears when people act as if the song is difficult to approach and listen to

[sapphixxx]

a couple years ago I was dismayed to realize that I had a piss poor competency at recognizing and understanding metaphor, and started working on trying to improve that. Jump to the present where now I am sitting in white knuckled furious frustration because now I am picking up on metaphor pretty well but have only become more aware that almost nobody else is, no matter how blunt they are.

[kingdomoftyto]

Watched the first episode of Stampede and it's. REALLY extremely good. but I am also, as predicted, in spiritual pain from how different the tone is from the original.

hhhhhhh c o n f l i c t e d . . .

[essektheylyss]

Do you understand how hard it is reading poststructuralist theory and wanting to critique the writing quality and structure of it. Do you know what kind of hell this cages a person into. I am fondly stroking the cover of this book whispering, "I could fix you," while simultaneously wondering if the fact that it needs fixing is half of the point.

[burning-sol]

Also, sidenote, do any of you think about how the donjon would differ for Jay or Chip. I can't stop thinking about it.

[prophecystation]

i feel like discourse about hockey (and sport in general) would really improve a lot if more people realized that spectator sport is a form of narrativized media and applied their literacy skills accordingly

[junogears2]

I'm such a fan of Post-Hardcore and Screamo that my musical taste makes me unable to judge anything. I'll literally hear a bunch of hypercompressed screams with slightly amateur instrumentals and be like "hell yeah this is the shit. this is the best.".