#that should be a thing in pop culture

[write-ou-gauche]

so much has happened in dracula daily lately that I can’t even process it all but holy shit why on earth is mina/jonathan not up there in the ranks of literary romances??? like why is the go-to example a pair of teenagers caught up in shitty politics and not THIS? their love for each other, the lengths they go to for each other, the unflinching support? how has this not seeped into pop culture as surely as the count has?

[gettiregretti]

Happy holidays!

This is my secret Santa for @pocketscribbles 🎄🧸🎅🏼 just some fun mistletoe kisses!

[synonymroll648]

headcanon that as sophie ages, she gets more and more off-put by how she still looks twenty at some age past 40. the only wrinkles she has are smile lines and a barely-there crease between her eyebrows that never leaves. no gray hairs. it doesn’t feel like there’s any physical evidence of how much stress aged her too fast.

(maybe she dyes more grays into her hair to feel better about her reflection, the more time passes by. maybe, on bad days, she contours wrinkles into her skin with makeup. maybe the bad days get more frequent as she ages outside the human lifespan. maybe.)

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

I don't know about you, but for a website that claims a lot of neurodivergent folks, this whole "every story has a specific, correct secret set of hidden meanings and if you can't figure them out you're just an idiot and should be mocked and shunned for it" interpretation of reading comprehension really puts my hackles up.

[commsroom]

doug eiffel is a car guy in the way that, like, he's got that pop culture attachment to the idealized great american road trip. there's not much eiffel dedicates himself to, but he learned to drive as soon as he could because having a car gave him freedom, and he valued that enough to care. he feels like the kind of person who has spent a lot of time sitting in his car listening to music, just to get away from... everything else. he's an analog guy; he can drive stick. he was made to go to drive-in movies. he calls the broken down shuttle he's stranded on - among other things - the "uss pontiac aztek", "uss ford excursion", and "uss reliant robin", so it's a reasonable bet he's got car opinions. monster trucks are on his list of things he misses about earth. he could be a nascar guy. eiffel was definitely living in an apartment, but if he had the space, he would love to be one of those guys with a bunch of rusted cars in his yard and an old truck up on cinderblocks. once zach said that if eiffel had money, he'd buy a motorcycle and tinker with it and never learn how to actually ride it.

"if eiffel had money" being the operative phrase. he used to drive a corolla - "that's the third warning. i'm not one hundred percent on how these oxygen meters work, but if they're anything like my old corolla..." - eiffel is a car guy in the sense he's got a list of dream cars, but they're all deeply impractical classic cars he just thinks are cool. in practice, he is driving the most 'dependable', most affordable cars possible, and he is not taking care of them. eiffel knows enough about cars that he could do his own maintenance, which means he won't pay someone else to do it, which means he's driving around with the check engine light on at all times. every car eiffel has ever driven has come like, pre-dented, permanently sounds like it's dying, and is just repulsive to be inside. it smells like old fast food wrappers and smoke in there. the back seat is full of miscellaneous garbage. the seats are stained and kinda sticky.

[daisyachain]

The nature of time is that (culturally) Christian Euro/Anglo colonial consumers (hereafter white ‘people’) fetishize the idea of being ‘close to nature’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ and latch on to the idea that there are groups of people in the world who are somehow bestial or who have some kind of special powers from holding animist beliefs/beliefs that acknowledge the body as opposed to the Christian belief that the body is a kind of useless appendage to a person. We see this across decades from the 19thC to today in the racist fetishization of indigenous people across the globe, particularly residents of the Americas, Australasia, and southern/eastern Africa.

White consumers use a warped conception of other cultures to live out the fantasies that the Christian soul/body stuff engenders. You keep getting told that your emotions and physical sensations are the devil’s work? You want to get in touch with those physical sensations, but you don’t want it to interfere with your worldview? Simply project them on to a convenient group of people with slightly different conventions from you. Imagine how cool it would be to be 100% physical sensation (especially those pesky violent and/or sexual urges) and no mental burden, then unleash that in a way that causes millions of deaths worldwide via the dehumanization of entire nations of people just trying to live their lives. White consumers love a Proud Warrior Race Guy.

Flash forward to the 2010s, it’s generally considered impolite to spread the same propaganda that justified the genocide and dispossession of many different groups of people. However white culture hasn’t changed that much and normal human activities still need to be explained away to maintain the veneer of white intellectualism that has been used to justify white violence for years and years. You can’t just stomp around and clap your hands and dance badly, you’ve got to project it somewhere else.

But wait! There’s a community of people considered ‘tribal’ and ‘savage’, considered violent and bestial, who were never colonized! It’s…the Norse. Fetishizing early medieval North Sea raiders can’t be cultural appropriation, see, they’re white! It’s not offensive to replace an entire culture with white (male) ideas of what’s cool if that culture is totally unassociated with colonizer stereotypes and is in fact a culture of colonizers!

And that’s my theory on why there are so many Norse-inspired folk bands/video games/tv shows/memes/literally anything in the 2010s. VSaga not counted because that manga has been running since 2003 and is actually well-researched and comes out of a culture with a similar but distinct tradition of racism. The Euro storytelling tendencies of needing some kind of violent avatar have taken on ye anciente Norseman now that people care a little bit about the gallons of blood used to sketch other ethnic stereotypes. Done and dusted. Except the other side is that the fetishization of early medieval Norse culture is literally just white supremacist 101 and a lot of artists don’t step around that nearly as carefully as they should

[stick-by-me]

Scooby dooby doo!

[selective-yellow]

Good Morning to Amber Heard only

[magentagalaxies]

guess who got an idea for another comedy essay (it's me. i do not have time to write essays other than my current school work rn but oh my goddd my brain is stilly in comedy analysis mode)

[queenlucythevaliant]

I read Lolita a couple weeks ago now. Here are my thoughts:

This book is fascinating. I couldn't shut up about it. The drive to keep reading was squarely in between the one that keeps me reading someone like Falkner (this book is being held together with some incredible mystery adhesive that I must identify/drizzle all over myself) and like. the high I got when I read Atlas Shrugged in 9th grade (I don't like it exactly, but it makes my brain light up as though I've just discovered quarks and now must figure out how to articulate my findings.)

Basically, reading this book is an exercise in reading past the narrator and trying to find scraps of the other characters (especially Dolores) in what he bothers to tell us. It's like panning for gold in a bunch of muck. It's a very active, almost athletic reading experience, if that makes sense.

The beauty of Dolores peeking through all Humbert's mud is that of an ordinary little girl brimming with quiet courage and irrepressible dignity. Dolores Hayes manages to hold her ground against Humbert's best efforts to subsume her and I ended the book just viscerally angry on her behalf. The prevailing sense that I had on finishing Lolita was one of deep injustice.

Nabokov is a treat as always (I've read and loved Speak, Memory and some of Letters to Vera, but this was my first foray into his fiction). The prose was appallingly clever and there were a few little storytelling tricks he pulled that had me all but cackling. The craft of this book is next level.

Reading it was exhausting. I do not think I could have gotten through it had it not been the middle of summer.

[howitglistened]

* this is not it a vague at anyone i swear, i have seen lots of povs already and i get all of them.

i think what olivia rodrigo said when asked whether vampire was about taylor was like. fine. it was not as graceful as it could have been and maybe an inappropriate time to remind people of that ethos of not wanting to pigeonhole a song - granted, i think it’s a perspective taylor herself clearly understands, but yk.

but like… it felt less about taylor and more just about not wanting to set a precedent for how she goes about answering those kinds of questions. which i get! and her expressing surprise seems like a pretty clear denial, regardless

edit: i said it in the tags too but she is SO young. bafflingly young! i think people forget how young 20 is, even for a celebrity! i am 23 and i still don’t feel like i know what i’m doing!!! idk just personally i feel like this is not that deep and she should be cut some slack.

[windmill-ghost]

I cannot imagine wanting to consume any piece of media as much as adult Harry Potter fans apparently do.

[symbioticsimplicity]

Steddie music cultural exchange headcanon #2

Steve doesn't really like most of Eddie's music, but won't tell him to change it. Though there is one artist he actually genuinely likes.

The Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzie Osborne.

Its not just because Eddie compared he and Steve, but rather that he actually paid attention to the man and he reminds him so much of Eddie.

The hair, the style, the presence, all so very much alike. So he starts listening to Ozzie on his own and finds he actually likes his music. The instrumentals aren't as harsh and grating as some metal can be, Ozzie's voice is pretty interesting, and the lyrics are pretty well thought out.

War Pigs is his favorite Black Sabbath song, and Crazy Train is his favorite solo song right up until Don't Wanna Stop is released years and years later

Eddie could not be more pleased about this.

[leatherbookmark]

ootd features the words "black dress" in its lyrics and people are like oh! this is a reference to another group's song, "black dress"!

i'm unwell.

[commsroom]

you know, wolf 359 is not really meant to be analyzed from a worldbuilding perspective, but, from a character perspective, one of the more interesting things about its alternate timeline is that line where hilbert says to minkowski,"there's something about a peacetime army that attracts people who want to know what it is like to kill someone but do not have the nerve to find out." the implication that minkowski, a career military woman in her 30s, joined the united states air force during peacetime and presumably has never faced real threat of active combat. it doesn't absolve her or any of the other characters with military history, but it is an interesting mitigating factor, and i think... while eiffel is absolutely not cut out to be a military man for a myriad of reasons, and while i think his history with the air force only really makes sense if you consider he joined because he didn't go to college and didn't have a whole lot of other options... it does make a little more sense he would consider it morally permissible with a history of and reasonably expected future of peacetime.

[aquietanarchy]

the whole Angry Mean Judgemental Old Testament God vs Loving Kind New Testament God thing is so weird to me, because like, have you read the Prophets? have you read the Epistles? so much of my trauma comes from shit Paul and Peter and James have said. meanwhile the writings of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Habakkuk etc are still so achingly beautiful to me