#subtext is still text

[snailpass]

finished the Book of Bill

[sagevalleymusings]

I get that the OP here was probably responding to Watson/Holmes queerbaiting or some equally similar trash, but I cannot overstate how untrue this statement is.

Something does not have to be explicitly stated to be authorial intent and characters staring at the camera and intoning "I'm gay and this is my boyfriend" is destroying our ability to actually interpret and enjoy subtext.

If it's not stated explicitly in the text, then it's not "representation", that's you finding something to relate to without authorial input & making it look more intentional than it is

[ellifromspace]

these are the murderbot artworks Tommy Arnold did for the Subterranean Press omnibus editions of the series, and a photo of Kevin R. Free, who narrates the murderbot audiobooks. when fans complain about the casting for the tv show, there is a very real basis for it in these past official/canonical aspects of the book series

[strawlessandbraless]

I mean we already knew, but it’s still beautiful. Still destiel.

[katabay]

my knight-monk agenda strikes again, but this was less of a 'I read something that made me experience several emotions and a strike of inspiration at once,' and more of a 'wouldn't it be fucked up if the bejeweled skeleton saints came to life and and started. eating people. or something. in revenge. medieval catholic horror, or an older horror of not being buried right. zombies, even. a complete bastardization of holy visuals. zombies.'

it's a far away idea, but I still wanted to play around with font layouts. like, if I DID make it into a full comic: these would be visual vibes, perhaps.

it's also a little bit about the kind of intimacy that these kinds of spaces provide, or in the case of this monk: the heavy trauma of war and the death of your brother, the escape to a secluded monastery, spiritual brotherhood to make up for your dead brother, but your role as a physician keeps pulling you back to this violence you want to escape. physician, heal thyself, only you have a holy calling to serve those in need, so instead: physician, open up your wounds again. saint jude, patron saint of lost causes, give us a fucking hand here, man. amen.

Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior, Identity, and Artistic Expression, James M. Saslow

and this one is about earlier history than the medieval period that this comic is set in, but the monk character is sort of an exploration of earlier themes. a little bit. I like overlapping eras with each other, I've done it before and I'll do it again. this character is an exploration of some other stuff too, but mostly this book was interesting to read

From Monastery to Hospital: Christian Monasticism and the Transformation of Health Care in Late Antiquity, Andrew T Crislip

bsky ⭐ pixiv ⭐ pillowfort ⭐ cohost

[cinematicnomad]

CHALLENGERS (2024) written by justin kuritzkes

[the-nothing-maker]

With all this talk of doubles/twins/doppelgangers in this decade's horror scene , I feel like now would be a perfect time for a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Big Movie. Like, let's just go all in and look closer at what "I had strange thoughts that made me feel tremendous shame even though I'm an active source of good for my community (but if they knew they'd hate me, surely) and so I sought a way to get rid of them as forcefully as I could by dumping them onto/into someone else" has to offer.

[fuckelonmuskihopehedies]

And just days before pride month too

[frobby]

do yall see my vision?

[clumsypuppy]

i feel like im not making any sense but does anyone else feel like there are stories that let u run with them and ones that spell everything out for you

[sulky-cabbage]

I'm convinced Kashimo is supposed to be the representative of gojo's inner feelings and thoughts.

For a number of reasons..

Reason number 1:

The similar appearance.

The fact that making two characters look similar is a very common way for mangakas to indicate that these characters have the same values and the same way of thinking or even a similar role (or a character arc).

An example that comes to mind is Bakugo and Kudo from my hero academy:

This happens A LOT in anime & manga and I'm pretty sure that gege wanted us to think of Gojo whenever we see Kashimo.

Interesting colors Gege👀

With blue eyes, and the the kanji for purple cloud in his surname

He even has the frog face

TWINS

Reason number 2:

I think Kashimo is basically Gojo but with more freedom, he can be feral whenever he wants and he even kills people.

And that's why he always ends up expressing what we know Gojo is thinking but isn't speaking out loud.

And once you see it you can't unsee it.

Here are some examples:

Gojo appears to be having such a great time, that Yuji wonders if he's thinking of Megumi at all. and Kashimo Starts acting as though he's relieving Satoru of the guilt of enjoying himself in this situation???

(This panel is actually what opened my third eye and made me theorize that maybe Kashimo is meant to tell us what Satoru isn't saying)

And I wasn't disappointed with the next chapters...

He's the only one that gets Satoru here.

Also there's this interesting thing here:

"Kashimo vs Sukuna!! Facing off in their true forms!!"

I find it interesting that Sukuna only turned into his true form after he killed Satoru...

It's like he only came forth after Satoru's "true" form (Kashimo) came out idk idk.

And the fact that he used the weapon Yorozu gave him on Kashimo. Hmmm

Reason number 3:

Gege always draws a connection between them.

Satoru's fight and Kashimo's are treated as one..

After Satoru died; the Kashimo fight starts immediately, and he gets killed in two chapters.

He gets to talk about love and loneliness with Sukuna after he died (we didn't get that with gojo it went to Kashimo)

The fight of the strongest is over.

We cut to Kenjaku's fight.

Gege literally made a character whose only goal was to fight Sukuna then he killed him in a single chapter.

That tells me gege only made him for that conversation about love 🤷‍♀️

The conclusion:

(This is what made me make this post in the first place 🤭)

If we accept that Kashimo is the representative of Gojo's inner self then...

We can safely assume that Gojo would've thought the following regarding Sukuna's true form:

(He's Using a special kind of visual prowess too...)

Think about it...

What Kashimo was saying about people being like dirt to him was kind of bad.

If that was truly how Gojo views people then I bet he was feeling guilty about it, no wonder he didn't say that shit to anyone.

He told Geto he views them as a flower. Satoru I love you T_T

(Gojo relating more to curses than humans walk with me) that's why he gets freaky with them.

But Viewing humans as nothing, and on top of that admiring the king of curses??? and calling him Perfection??? Beautiful even???

Nah.. Nanami was right this mf Satoru is a jujutsu pervert😭😭

Like.....

This is the conversation they were having after they saw him fight...

Gege Why are you bringing it up now indeed

Hmmmmmmmm

👀👀👀👀

[bumps-in-the-night]

It was so cool of Carmilla and Laura to invent lesbianism

[henrysglock]

how I look at Kate and the Duffers after they legit had Brenner on Broadway do things that are ripped straight out of my most controversial Brenner fic—which was posted way before Broadway ticket presale was even announced—and then they also fixed many of the plot holes/made a lot of subtext into text that I mentioned in the massive, controversial TFS analysis that I posted on my ao3 the same day Broadway tickets went on presale, and then they ALSO added specific details from the most recent (posted back in December) chapter of my less-controversial Henry fix-it fic that already had a spooky amount of similarities to the West End show when it debuted:

[bestworstcase]

What are your thoughts on the use of rose symbolism across the show? (Ruby, Adam, Summer, the songs)

ough.

ok broadly speaking there are three different but intertwining Rose Motifs, to wit,

the burning rose (summer + ruby)

the withered rose (adam)

roses that rot or die (salem)

but the third motif is complicated because salem herself is not symbolically identified as a rose but rather with the broken moon, most overtly in sacrifice ("the moon will sadly watch the roses die/in vain").

so. the very first few images in rwby are 1. the full unbroken moon, with a single red rose petal floating up into the frame; 2. ruby, cloaked and shedding rose petals, standing before a gravestone with the moon at her back; and 3. the gravestone, with the burning rose engraved upon it, and below that the name Summer Rose and the epitaph Thus Kindly I Scatter. note also that the grimm in the red trailer bleed rose petals.

it is possible that the key aesthetics weren’t decided yet, but: 1. the moon is broken and a normal size in the white trailer, and 2. "red like roses fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest"—the red trailer is the dream. that ruby keeps having about her mom. RLR2 playing under the nevermore fight (and the burst of rose petals when ruby decapitates it—something that doesn’t happen with any other defeated grimm) underscore this point. ruby is looking for her mother inside the grimm.

(that’s why she jumps to the specific conclusion she does when she sees the guy in the hound, incidentally. cutting open a grimm and finding what’s left of her mom is the nightmare that has been haunting her subconscious ever since she learnt that summer wasn’t coming back.)

anyway, because the red trailer depicts a dream it goes extra ham with the symbolism. (and it makes a very neat implication about who ruby is that where her teammates are all introduced to us in these active moments of striving for what they want, ruby’s pain is buried so deep that she can only find it in her dreams—see also her arc in the ever after.) 

so the red trailer provides something of an interpretive guide—the burning rose is a symbol of death, we first see it on a gravestone, and the red rose petals suggest grief but they are also, explicitly, associated with blood and violence. and then there’s this huge moon looming on the horizon. on a second viewing you realize that ruby’s dream is lit by either a whole moon that never broke or that the broken face is rotated away, hidden, and because dreams are non-literal it can be both of these things at the same time. 

then on top of this we have the grave of summer rose—in this dream of a bleak, colorless winter—and that epitaph, "thus kindly i scatter," which if you know the poem (or take the time to look it up) is immediately a curveball because it’s…

'Tis the last rose of summer, Left blooming alone; All her lovely companions Are faded and gone; No flower of her kindred, No rose-bud is nigh, To reflect back her blushes Or give sigh for sigh! I'll not leave thee, thou lone one. To pine on the stem; Since the lovely are sleeping, Go, sleep thou with them; Thus kindly I scatter Thy leaves o'er the bed, Where thy mates of the garden Lie scentless and dead. So soon may I follow, When friendships decay, And from love's shining circle The gems drop away! When true hearts lie withered, And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit This bleak world alone?

an interesting allusion to follow this:

"red like roses fills my dreams"—ruby turns around here to walks away from the grave, toward the moon—"and brings me to the place you rest." and then her departure reveals that summer’s epitaph is this moment when the poem’s speaker plucks a rose and scatters its petals upon the ground to express sorrow for its loss and loneliness; "oh, who would inhabit this bleak world alone?"

the rose in the poem is not summer, in other words. summer’s epitaph identifies her with the speaker who scatters the rose, and the red petals "bleeding" from ruby’s cloak insinuate her as the scattered rose.

keeping that in mind, consider the lyrics of RLR1 in relation to the accompanying imagery in the red trailer; yes the song is a thematic statement about the four main characters, but it’s also illustrated in a very deliberate way.

"red like roses fills my dreams and brings me to the place you rest"—in this dream, the redness comes from ruby. she is carrying it with her, around herself, and it leads her from the grave to the grimm, whom she breaks opens to reveal the red of her own pain… beneath this white unbroken moon, which,

hi. (ruby can’t see summer in her dreams when the moon is at her back, but in the moonlight she sees the ghost of her mother, shedding white…? she imagines rose petals, finding herself in summer’s reflection. but in the red trailer it’s snowing.)

"white is cold and always yearning, burdened by a royal test"—journey through a bleak, snow-bound forest toward an open field. aside from the obvious grief metaphor: the warrior in the woods, the white witch in the woods, the grimm child… and the indecisive king, in which a silver crown torments a king with haunting visions of an impossible crossroads that leave him "pale as the moon."

and then: "black the beast descends from shadows," as she looks up to find herself surrounded by grimm. the imagery of descent from shadows has also always interested me because it’s ordinarily reversed; one rises up from shadows, as in 'this time', but rwby turns it upside-down in a specific way; the descent from shadow precipitates a new flame rising from the ashes, here as in 'from shadows' and (more poetically) elsewhere, which is also why the line runs into "yellow beauty burns…"

with "gold" being the shot of ruby suspended in midair before the moon, which in just this one shot glows golden like the sun.

burning rose. burning rose. gold, the song about yang picking up the pieces and trying to comfort ruby after summer’s death, goes like this:

If the stars all fall When there’s no more light And the moon should crumble It will be alright Don’t you worry about the dark I will light up the night with the love in my heart I will burn like the sun I will keep you safe and warm Like the smell of a rose on a summer’s day I will be there to take all your fears away With a touch of my hand I’ll turn your life to gold

notice the mirrored imagery with sacrifice:

Born an angel, heaven-sent Falls from grace are never elegant Stars will drop out of the sky The moon will sadly watch the roses die In vain Lost, no gain But you’re not taking me.

as well as the imagery in sacrifice ("all your faith in ancient ways/leaves you trapped inside a maze/take the lives of those you need/sow the death and reap the seed"), reversed in rising ("a rose will grow to be a seed/from every life, another leads/born the way were meant to be"), both rhymed in for every life ("some roses will never bloom/some dreams will rot on the vine/some lives will end much too soon/some evil will never ever die/some wars will not end in peace/some heroes choose the wrong side/sometimes it’s worth it all/to risk the fall").

there is a pattern here.

the burning rose is a symbol of death. the withered or decaying rose suggests, not death, but slow corruption: adam’s is "just the story of a boy who lost his way/into shadows strayed," descending into a darkness too deep to rekindle as flame—and it is through juxtaposition with the withering rose that the burning rose also becomes a symbol for revival, as new fire blossoming from ashes.

and then both of these symbols are adjacent to the broken moon, which represents 1. the death and resurrection of humanity (thence its symbolic association with silver eyes), and 2. salem herself.

in volume one, summer appears only in the light of the moon and the grimm in the red trailer ignite the (seemingly unbroken) moon—this evokes the in-universe folklore about the broken moon having been the sun, once upon a time when there was no light in the sky at all during the night, so there’s burning-moon phoenix imagery hiding in plain sight here. when summer left, she left the burning rose behind. (which i’d call a smoking gun for summer not being dead if that weren’t already so obvious. but she unburdened herself of the death-symbol before confronting salem. lol.)

summer herself is also pointedly not the rose but one who scatters it, which puts her in juxtaposition to the way salem associates ozma with roses in sacrifice. (HE is the roses that salem, the moon, sadly watches: this becomes quite clear once you grasp that withering/decaying roses symbolize corruption, spiritual death. this is why sacrifice and nevermore rhyme, btw:

— "born an angel, heaven-sent/falls from grace are never elegant" -> "you think you’re someone’s hero/you’re hiding more than your eyes"

— "back when it started/i thought that justice was your goal/then in the darkness/you lost your mind/i lost my soul/that’s in the past and i won’t be controlled" -> "stars will drop out of the sky/the moon will sadly watch the roses die/in vain/lost, no gain/but you’re not taking me"

— "you can’t have my life/i’m not your sacrifice/you can try, but i’m free/and you won’t conquer me/i won’t crawl/most of all/i won’t fall/for you" -> "you may have taken the lead/but i’ll even the score/you won the battle, you won’t win the war" and "i won’t stay a martyr/it’s my turn to take back what you stole"

— "you promised hope, salvation/gave me a place to be/but your vision of liberation/was all about you/it could never apply to me" -> "show them gods and deities/blind and keep the people on their knees/pierce the sky, escape your fate/the more you try, the more you’ll just breed hate/and lies/truth will rise/revealed by mirrored eyes" -> "i challenge your weak manifesto/the goal of a savior is not to be lionized" -> "what if all the plans you made/were not worth the price they paid?"

it’s the SAME SONG. you stalked me across anima / he had to destroy salem.)

this is part of why i think rising is a salem + summer song, the mirrored (ha ha) rose imagery; ozma the rose who never bloomed and rotted on the vine, summer the rose who burned and regrew from the ashes to rise like the moon. ozma who sows death and reaps the seeds, summer who flowered and planted new seeds. (the other part is that rising is a paean to cyclical change—destruction—death and resurrection. it doesn’t express the perspectives of the main characters, it exhorts them to learn the lessons the blacksmith eventually teaches them and it is a direct rebuke to miracle, which plays first.)

[undead-cypress]

Constantly rotating Junah in my mind ngl. She's such a carefully written character. Every single line of hers is so considered and it flies over some people's heads....once you get it, it's just 🤌. It's a treat, for us.

Maybe I'll make a long post about it at some point, because it's another thing that putting into Japanese cultural context would be more plainly obvious. For the people who gets it, I am holding your hands. For a painfully obvious hint, look at the colours on Royal Dancer