#the parallel between me and dumb

[plutomarigold]

I'm so ok bro like I'm so chill bro like don't even worry bro

[nenoname]

4 pages of stan's nightmare.... him beating bill via sheer paranoia and spite and the fact he can't trust people being nice to him....

[a-dumb-sarcastic-bisexual]

I’m back from my coma to talk about Nimona again

Specifically these scenes 

Because this is the moment where the similarities between Gloreth and Ambrosius’ stories end

At face value, these scenes seem incredibly similar 

In both scenes, Gloreth and Ambrosius are watching terrified as their homes are burning down around them because of a “monster” 

But that’s where the similarities stop

Because in the first scene, Gloreth decides to listen to everything that her community has told her 

And in the second scene, Ambrosius has finally figured out that everything he’s been told since he was a kid is a lie

[janetfraisersmassivestrap]

My Fair Lady (1964) // 30 Rock (2006)

[icantdothistodaybruh]

yea sooooo I may have or may have not watched and instantly rewatched all kuro musicals in existence in a spawn of one week and now have roughly 40 screenshots to redraw from

I think I might be insane or something

[girlmetalsonic]

thinking abt how sonic is represented by the wind while metal is represented by storms. on the surface both seem free and uncontrollable, with storms just being the more violent version, but wind is really the only free one. wind can be gentle or harsh, but theres really nothing deciding that. a storm on the other hand, is controlled entirely by the wind. its direction and intensity are pretty much completely based on the wind. without the wind its just rain.

[sweetandglovelyart]

Knightfall in Dream Land - Page 4

Meta Knight shares what it was like to grow up being raised by Nightmare.

[widowshill]

VAMP ROGER AU QUESTION! how would he and barnabas interact together (if they ever interact)? :3 💜

tagging @tortoisesshells because she's my co-conspirator <3

excellent question! this family and their sharp-toothed men will be the death of ... well, several community members of Collinsport, i suppose.

to start — Barnabas gets out of the box slightly differently than in canon, which colors his relationship to Roger and the rest of the household. Roger kills Willie after his attempted assault on Carolyn and Vicki (who is, by that point, his wife); Willie's mysterious disappearance and Roger's suspected involvement makes Jason that much more panicked, desperate, and correspondingly aggressive. Liz goes searching for the lost family jewels in a last-ditch attempt to buy Jason off, and, inadvertently, lets their ancient family sin out of the tomb.

ergo she's made Barnabas' thrall instead of Willie, but this goes unnoticed for a while — even though her brother would, in theory, recognize the signs, and his suspicions are raised, but she's already acting so much unlike herself with Jason around that he doesn't suspect anyone else of doing her harm. yet.

at the start, he and Barnabas get along very well, even before they discover their shared affliction: they're both relatively sophisticated, well-traveled, intelligent people, and for all that Roger decries Liz's emphasis on the Collins name, he leans towards familial connections instinctively (Roger hasn't got much in the way of friends outside of the house even in canon, and he's even more isolated as a vampire).

after he finds out Barnabas is also a vampire, things get a little more complicated, but overall, they're still friendly. Roger doesn't have much sympathy for Barnabas' relentless self-pity and decrying his doomed fate to live as a monster, because Roger on the whole enjoys his vampirism and has made a decent un-life for himself out of it (thanks in no small part to Vicki). but having someone like him around is a comfort in ways he wouldn't have expected, he's no longer solitary or uniquely monstrous out of the Collins family, he has someone else around through the night, and someone who understands the sufferings of bloodthirst and being shut out of the sun.

furthermore, Roger's very much interested in his family history and stories of the past, the building of Collinwood, Jeremiah's ships – and Barnabas was there. there's potential for some very interesting conversations about the past, and the arc of the Collins family history to the present, not to mention literature, travel, fashion, politics and the rest. Roger's his cousin's mirror in modernity in many ways, and that's something potentially interesting to explore: the world changes around them, but Collinses do not.

as an aside, they both have a funny sort of relationship to Burke. Barnabas hates him for his resemblance to Jeremiah and envies his friendship with Vicki and thinks he's crude, and Roger ... well. it's complicated. it's closer to antagonism than not, and Burke has tried to kill him once in this au, and Roger resents his flirting with Vicki, but then there's everything else with their past. so I don't think Barnabas' treatment of him would sit particularly well with Roger, he'd take the attitude of hey, only I can be a dick to Burke >:(

the definite fracture point is Barnabas imprinting on Vicki. Roger's already jealous and possessive by nature, and it's amplified by the supernatural nature of his relationship to Vicki (being closer, bodily and mentally; being necessary to each other; being, quite literally, sustenance) so he's already a little on edge when Barnabas starts paying attention to her, giving her presents, and appreciating the scenery — Barnabas doesn't, exactly, tend to have much in the way of moral inclination to leaving women alone when they have prior engagements, but it's fair to point out the irony of everything Roger was doing with his bloodbag governess when he was still very much a married man.

anyway: Roger finds foreign bite marks on his wife's neck, and he's understandably immensely upset by this. partially out of territorial sentiment, but he also knows Vicki, and he knows that she wouldn't have invited another vampire willingly — which means that she was forced, or hypnotized, or attacked in secret, and there's only the one potential suspect. this is already enough to lose his good will, but he might have been willing to let Barnabas go with a "hands off," had this discovery not lead to finding out what he'd also been doing to Liz. the combination of the two is unforgivable, and it's Barnabas' error to have made an enemy who is very personally aware of all his vampiric weaknesses, and Burke's already carved a stake.

[bushia]

dudes, i finished Once Upon a Time in Lingjian Mountain and it was so fucking good and funny ?????? I don't remember where I saw this rec but i'm glad i reviewed it on serializd cause if it can make people to watch it, I WILL BE GLAD.

[4giorno]

i usually refuse to watch keeping up with star rail bc i cant stand that fucking owl but i had to watch aventurines bc omg the scream i scrumpt

[blindtaleteller]

tags. cause all that and I'm too lazy tonight to pull it over? lol

following the theory that loki intentionally banded the avengers together so he could sicc them on thanos later, after he took the throne in T:TDW, i think he'd be so angry at the events of civil war like:

loki as odin: hello heimdall, how do earth's mightiest heroes fare as of late?

heimdall: they have disagreed on many subjects and split up two days ago

loki:

heimdall:

loki: they haVE WHAT?

cue loki coming down to earth and bonking everyone's heads together until they all get along again

stark: how the heck are you alive???

loki: skills. listen here, i did not pour my blood, sweat and tears to form this team for you idiots to throw all my hard work out the window!

loki, grabbing rhodes and stark by the wrists: now, we are going to get your little friends out of prison, understood?

like an exasperated kindergarten teacher, y'know?

Loki, hitting Steve over the head with a newspaper: he's your friend, of course he's upset you lied to him about something like this

Tony: hah!

Loki, giving Tony a death glare: did you have to fight each other about it

[luvnette]

-𝐶𝑜𝑤𝑔𝑖𝑟𝑙!𝑆𝑒𝑣𝑖𝑘𝑎 𝐻𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑐𝑎𝑛𝑜𝑛𝑠-

𝑃𝑎𝑖𝑟𝑖𝑛𝑔: Cowgirl!Sevika x Fem!Reader

𝐶𝑜𝑛𝑡𝑒𝑛𝑡/𝑊𝑎𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠: SFW, men and minors DNI, fluff, Sevika has both arms, she is younger (like 20 idk) and a little immature in the beginning, r! and Sevika get married, r! gets pregnant by her (don’t know how and it doesn’t matter), just happy western lesbianism

𝐴/𝑛: This is a little based on the game Rdr2, so don’t be surprised if there are parallels between Sevi and the characters. It also turned out kinda story-ish, hope u don’t mind. Anyway, have fun!<3

Cowgirl!Sevika was an outlaw in a small gang of 4 (Her, Silco, Vander and Felicia) when she met you, killing, robbing and hunting for the food on her plate. She loves to tell you stories about how she nearly got caught a few times or what kind of people crossed her path. She’ll also show off her scars from brawls and fights.

Cowgirl!Sevika is pretty good at drawing, she has a journal with sketches of animals, flowers or random objects in them- and you, of course.

Cowgirl!Sevika will pick the prettiest flowers for you while she’s out, giving them to you when she comes back. “Here, these reminded me of you, sweetie”

Cowgirl!Sevika couldn’t afford fancy dates back then, but she still managed to make your time with her quite enjoyable. She took you out on rides, showing you her favorite places, drawing you or just talking about all kinds of stuff. Sometimes you two even camped together, her teaching you some ‘cool survival skills’ (they’re either basic outdoor 1x1 or really dangerous)

Cowgirl!Sevika loves Black Jack. She likes it even more than poker and could play for hours while you’re perched on her lap, watching her win every single round

Cowgirl!Sevika is a pretty big woman, that’s why she prefers to ride draft horses like Shires and Clydesdales. She will gladly show you how horse riding works, if you don’t know that already.

Cowgirl!Sevika will flirt with you like she sees you for the first time when she’s drunk, super excited and giddy- and when you remind her that you’re already dating, she gets all flustered and happy. “Sucha’ pretty girl like you..*hick*..need a ride by any chance?” she asks, swinging her arm around you. “Sevi, you’ve been my ride for the last couple months” you chuckle, giving her a small peck on the cheek. “Oh..right..*hick*..well, lucky me then!” she blushes, peppering your face with kisses

Cowgirl!Sevika is a huge fan of PDA. She’ll show everyone how deeply you two are in love, kissing and touching you whenever someone is giving you a dumb look. If you’re not into it though, she’ll simply give you all her attention later (in bed *wink*)

Cowgirl!Sevika gives the greatest bear hugs. No matter if it’s a goodbye, you feeling sad or her being touch starved, her embrace is strong, warm and caring. She also likes to have you really close while sleeping

Cowgirl!Sevika will give you her hat when it’s too sunny or her poncho when you’re cold.

Cowgirl!Sevika loves to go on sunset rides, you sitting in front of her in the saddle, your back pressed against her chest. Sometimes, she hitches her horse onto a tree, helping you down to cuddle up in the grass and enjoy the view together. She’d also propose to you this way after a few years, you two passionately making out in the greenery until she suddenly stops to look you in the eyes. “Wanna’ get married?” she whispers, giving you the sweetest smile. At first you’re staring at her surprised, but then you pull her in for a long kiss, murmuring a happy “yes..” against her lips.

Cowgirl!Sevika will save up money after you’re married to buy a small farm for the two of you. She’ll build a house and a barn with the help of the other gang members, plant crops, purchase some cattle and earn money by selling farm goods from now on.

Since then, cowgirl!Sevika can decide her own work-hours, making sure she spends most of the day with you. And sometimes, when you two got nothing to do, you’ll sit down on the porch together, drinking tea and enjoying your peaceful little life.

Cowgirl!Sevika truly loves entering the house to the smell of cooked or baked food. She’ll join you in the kitchen, tenderly holding you from behind, kissing your neck. “Need help darling?” she’ll ask. “You can set the table, my love” you answer, kissing her soft lips. She always trys to help you with literally anything.

Cowgirl!Sevika’s favourite snack becomes strawberries and cream, especially when you make it for her. She also really loves apple pie though.

Cowgirl!Sevika absolutely adores soft mornings, the warm sun shining into your shared bedroom, you dressed in your nightgown, dozing on top of her chest. She’ll run her fingers through your hair and simply listen to your soft breathing.

Cowgirl!Sevika starts to dream of you being pregnant after some time on the farm. She thinks about it more and more often, getting a huge baby fever. “Sweetheart? can I ask you something?” she says, waking you up in the middle of the night. “Hmm?” you hum half asleep, slowly opening your eyes. “What if we.. you know.. start a family?” she asks, mumbling the last part. “Well.. I actually thought about that too..” you whisper, giving her a slightly concerned look. “No matter what you want, I’ll be here loving you” she smiles at you and gives you a kiss on your forehead, before you two get back to sleep.

And after around 10 months of cowgirl!Sevika being constantly around you and your growing belly, you two become mommy and mama to your first daughter. She couldn’t ask for more when she sees you holding her baby, her eyes always getting a little wet.

Cowgirl!Sevika’s life couldn’t be more perfect with you in it, her beautiful and lovely wife<3

[yanderenightmare]

Geto Suguru & Gojo Satoru

TW: NSFW, dubcon, suggestiveness, pressuring, blindfolding

FEM reader

Your boyfriend Suguru is really nonchalant when asking if you’d like to fuck his best friend, Satoru.

Obviously, you look up at him with an appalled grimace – a look of serious shock and animated disgust – before you snort out, “What kinda joke is that?”

He keeps on just as casually as before – stroking his fingers up and down your bare arm where you lie halfway against his chest, tucked close in the nook of his body. “I wouldn’t mind.” He says – blank eyes kept staring at his laptop as though he was actually paying attention to the sitcom the two of you were no longer watching.

Your grimace drops to a frown, sitting up and raising a brow at him. “You wouldn't mind if I cheated on you with your best friend?”

You ask it rhetorically, but he doesn’t take it as such. Arguing against it, “It’s not cheating if I allow it.”

It makes you go quiet, pouting now. Looking at him while trying to decipher his game. “Do you...” You approach carefully – not sure where this is all headed. “Do you want us to?”

“Why d'you ask?”

Your grimace returns at the dumb response – now looking a little pissy.

“Why me? Why’d��you ask?” This is so typical of him. Suguru just loves baiting you into admitting things you don’t want to. But this time, he's got it wrong because you have no interest in Gojo. If you did, you wouldn’t be lying in bed with his friend, now would you?

“Satoru wants to fuck you.” Suguru cuts off your inner ramble, and your grimace softens again – now just looking at him in confusion.

“What makes you say that?” You ask, and he continues pretending to watch the plot thicken on screen.

Still just as casual, saying, “‘Cause he told me.”

You gape at him, and then you scoff – folding your arms against your chest with an additional huff. “The nerve on that guy, honestly.”

“So you don’t want to fuck him?” Suguru’s eyes finally slide off to glance at you, waiting for your reaction.

You return his gaze, and then you smile. "Oh, Suguru~" You hum in a sultry murmur.

Lifting the laptop, you set it aside softly on the bedside table, freeing up room on his lap for you to crawl on top.

He accepts the advance smoothly, placing his hands on your hips as you lean in to kiss him with that same smile – moaning into your mouth with a rugged shudder when your hand dives beneath the band of his sweats. 

“All I want...” You whisper while taking him in your palm, giving him a light squeeze and a gentle tug before feeling it grow fat and warm under your touch. “Is to make you happy.”

A couple of days later, you come by only for Gojo to be there as well.

You're confused at first, but Suguru acts as though it was all something the three of you had planned – and so does his white-heard friend, who’s standing by his side with a wide grin on his face – halfway hidden behind the same unnerving blindfold as always.

And you don’t know how you all wind up there...

But the three of you are in the bedroom not long after.

Suguru is sitting in an armchair just next to the bed you’re kneeling on – while Gojo kneels parallel to you.

“Uhm... I don't know about this...” You say reluctantly, folding your arms in front of your body while looking to Suguru – anything to avoid eye contact with the half-naked guy sitting before you. 

You had all stripped down to just underwear under your boyfriend’s command – but contrary to you, they'd been neither shocked, embarrassed, or uncomfortable with it.

Suguru gives you a gentle smile. “You said you wanted to make me happy.” His eyes are calm and suave, like always. “This would make me very happy.”

You look at him for a while, trying to find comfort for the anxious furl between your brows – then you glance at the other boy, but your eyes don’t even reach his before you immediately look away again – back to Suguru.

You swallow the dryness in your throat.

“I’m sorry, but... I don't understand this...” You whisper under your breath as though you wanted the conversation to be private – between just the two of you, despite the third member whose knees brushed yours. “Help me understand.”

“It’s simple.” Said third member interrupted, calling your gaze to his piercing blue one. “You’re his girlfriend, and I’m his best friend – we’re his two favorite people in the world. He just wants to see us get along…” He leans closer until his breath wafts across your face. “Can you do that?”

You dismiss his advance with a turn of your head, looking back at your boyfriend again. “Are you sure about this?”

He just gives you a secure smile in return. “I’m sure.”

And with the last reassurance, Gojo’s hands slide up your thighs, making you gasp. “You heard him.” He finalizes. And you, caught by surprise from the sudden contact, whip your head back to look at him with wide eyes only for his lips to meet yours.

You make a sound, then an additional louder one as he pushes his tongue inside along yours – quickly followed by him shuffling closer. With his hands grabbing your hips, he pulls you around his torso, making you fall back until you hit the bed flat.

You don’t know how you’re supposed to enjoy this – letting your boyfriend's best friend kiss and touch your body while he just sits still and watches the two of you in silence.

You try looking at him to see if he’s still as unshaken, but Gojo’s quick – much more aggressive than Suguru usually is. 

The wetness of Gojo's tongue playing with yours makes your head so hot – chest pounding so fast you fear it might just bleed out in your chest. But he has no mercy, wasting no time – hooking your legs up around his hips before slipping his hand between them.

You felt something snap in your mind when he fingered the hem of your panties, or maybe it was your heart skipping a beat – either way – you broke the kiss off with a shove to his chest. Panting out, “No, stop-” 

You prop yourself up and shuffle out from under his progressive touches. Breaths hitched as you wiped your mouth dry from his spit.

“I’m sorry, Suguru – I can’t do this...”

Feeling flushed, you were riddled with goosebumps from head to toe – still denying those searing bright blues you felt stare you through. Tucking your legs close to your chest, you wrapped your arms around them – waiting for any sort of consolation, any words to tell you it was okay, that it was a silly idea to begin with, that you absolutely don’t have to do anything you're not comfortable doing.

But nothing of the sort ever comes...

Instead, after a silence, your boyfriend’s hand reaches out to brush something along your leg.

You peek up – watery eyes blinking once, then twice to focus, until seeing the thing held in his hand.

“How ‘bout you wear this and pretend he’s me?” He proposes smoothly, still with a gentle smile shaping his face.

It’s Gojo’s blindfold.

“Would that make you feel better?”

You hesitate, sinking your teeth into your lip.

It takes a moment, but eventually, you give an ever so timid, “Okay...”

And again, you don’t know how the three of you get there… but not long after, you’re seated on Gojo’s lap with his fat cock nestled deep inside you, being bounced on him like a toy doll.

“Suguru~” You moan – but he's not the one who's gruffing out hot and heavy breaths against your neck while sucking fresh lovebites on top of the ones left there by your actual boyfriend a couple of days before.

“You’re real’ loyal – cryin’ out his name with my dick inside yah-” Gojo groans, squeezing your tits in both hands, tweaking your nipples until you whine out again, same name on your lips. “Aw, c’mon – won’t you cry like that fo’me too~”

Your legs are propped up on Suguru’s broad back. You can’t see him through the blindfold, but you recognize that tongue – laving at your clit with kitten licks and suckling kisses while Gojo pumps his full length inside you on every thrust.

“C’mon, you’ gon’ make me beg for it?” Gojo catches your mouth, making you share each other’s breath while sloppily feeding you his tongue. “C’mon, say my name~ it’s not that different – should roll just as easily off your tongue~”

He picks up the pace along with his pleas, punching your insides to mush – making you twist where you lie sweaty against his chest.

Hot air hits your slit with words from a tongue licking all the right nerves. “Go on, baby~ moan for him like you moan fo’me~”

It makes you shudder, feeling so hot and so awfully good – your feel a guilt telling you to deny it, but it’s simply unbearable. “Oh-fuck – Satoru~”

“Yes-yes-yes~” He chants at your ear, licking the shell of it while he slips off your blindfold to let you watch Suguru lick your clit like a puppy – his own cock kept lonely between his legs, leaking out onto the sheets – edged and red from the toll of it.

The sight makes you feel some type of way.

“Oh fuck – don't squeeze so tight, I’m gonna cum-” Gojo whines, holding you tighter while sinking in deep.

“Ew, no – pull out, pull out-” You protest, shaking your head while trying to wiggle out of the tight hug he's got you trapped in. 

“No – I'll clean it out-” Comes an additional plea from beneath you. Suguru kisses the belly bulge made by Gojo’s fat cock, then licks a strip from the weight of his balls up to where he has your hole stretched around his girth, mouthing at it in moans while his nose rubs your clit. “Please, princess, let him cum inside~”

Both you and Gojo swallow thickly, panting in unison.

“How can you say no to that?” He asks against your ear.

Your thighs shake while you whine, “Ugh~ fine – but someone’s buying a pill.”

Suguru only hums, laying his tongue flat against your clit again, knowing exactly what to do to time your orgasm with the flood of cum that soon splurged your insides with creamy white.

Gojo grunts with the release, and you quake, milking it out of him until he winces from the overstimulation – sloshing out while heaving for air.

You sigh, but before you can come all the way down, Suguru’s filling the vacancy with himself – making you suck it up again as he bullies his way inside in a series of quick-timed pumps before he's filling you up with his own thick mess.

He takes your face and kisses you despite you both being too breathless to sustain it for long, left to huff short puffs of air on one another’s wet lips.

He rests his forehead on yours until your pussy’s squeezed him free of the last drop, then swallows thickly.

There's a grating chuckle. “Don’t know if a pill’s gonna help...”

♡ GOJO SATORU masterlist ♡ GETO SUGURU masterlist ♡ JUJUTSU KAISEN masterlist

Revised version available here:

[whetstonefires]

Thinking about the parallels set up between Wei Wuxian and Mo Xuanyu, and how actually most of them are oddly specious.

The sketch of the backstory lines up, but on close examination they're mirror images.

Wei Wuxian wasn't kicked out of his sect, he left it. Wei Wuxian didn't hate the house he grew up in, he loved it, and getting the people there killed was the absolute last purpose for which his dark powers were ever intended.

Jiang Cheng was no Mo Ziyuan--his jealousy was a complicated thing all twisted up with love, and while he would lash out at Wei Wuxian both as a casual means of shit communication and more damagingly in moments of high tension, he had neither the desire nor the ability to bully him, and in general respected his boundaries almost too well.

When Wei Wuxian destroyed himself about Jiang Cheng, it was to give him cultivation, and protect his life and happiness. He would never have killed him.

Madam Yu was a domineering aunt-like figure, who hated Wei Wuxian for reasons of reputation, and because she had resented his dead mother, but she crucially did not have the power to actually disrupt his lifestyle to any significant extent.

Mo Xuanyu was shut up in a small room to rot; Wei Wuxian didn't even attend classes unless he wanted to. Mo Xuanyu was weak and disliked; Wei Wuxian was brilliant and popular.

Mo Xuanyu's uncle is a cipher of a figure, without character or agency, a nonentity who is resented to death apparently mostly for what he didn't do; in theory he is the master of the house, but he certainly never protected his wife and son's punching bag from them.

And this is what got me thinking along this track: because people keep interpreting Jiang Fengmian as this, as exactly like Mo Xuanyu's nameless uncle, a nonentity who lets his wife make all the decisions, and is contemptible therefore.

He shows up in fic characterized this way all the time, handled narratively as a gap rather than a person, an absence where there should have been a parent, and it's...totally inaccurate? The man only has a few scenes but the things that are most firmly established about him are:

he regularly goes out of his way to protect Wei Wuxian

he's extremely fond of Wei Wuxian

he cares a lot about ethical behavior

he's conflict-avoidant and gentle

he can and will overrule Yu Ziyuan when he's made up his mind, and there's nothing she can do about it

his communication skills are mediocre at best

he doesn't understand jiang cheng

he has a dumb sense of humor

Now almost none of this made it into cql besides point 4 and maybe 6, 5 is technically there but buried by the cinematic framing, so I totally get why the fandom on the whole struggles to characterize him well, and it's easier to write him off.

But it keeps bugging me to see him and Yu Ziyuan squashed into the mold of the Mo, because not only is that boring and reductive and kind-of-missing-the-point, it's like. Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng's characterization suffers a lot when you alter the environment and take away the influence exerted by their shared father figure.

Jiang Fengmian was Wei Wuxian's primary adult role model and it shows.

Jiang Cheng's relationship to his own sense of ethics is fraught because 'teaching him good ethics' was his dad's number one parenting goal, but they misunderstood each other so badly (partly because Yu Ziyuan kept loudly misinterpreting them to each other, which is so realistic I can't get over it, that's exactly how it works good lord) that Jiang Cheng has a direct association between the concept of 'doing the right thing even when it's hard' and a feeling of personal inadequacy.

The fact that Wei Wuxian got their dad-person's approval for being exactly himself and Jiang Cheng not only couldn't do that, he couldn't even get that same level of approval when he really pushed himself to rise to expectations, because Jiang Fengmian did not intend that warmth as a 'reward,' and so never realized he was withholding it, and therefore misunderstood Jiang Cheng's visible jealousy as a dangerous sense of personal entitlement that had to be carefully restrained, which reinforced his distrust of Jiang-Cheng-the-person and fed into a shitty loop where they were less and less able to relate to one another--that's fantastic. That's so human! I love it so much.

Both their failures are their own but at the same time it would never have gotten so bad if Yu Ziyuan hadn't been interjecting herself in there, in the middle of their relationship, fucking it up. That's family, baby.

I would ofc like if there was more fic engaging with the subtleties of all this because it's so good, mxtx did such elegant work here and it is not sufficiently appreciated. But it's the kind of thing that's hard to write good fic about; I am struggling with it myself.

So mostly I wish there was just more fic that didn't impose Mo Xuanyu's cliche angst backstory on Wei Wuxian, who has a whole different thing going on.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Sandra Newman’s “Julia”

The first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four has a fantastic joke that nearly everyone misses: when Julia, Winston Smith's love interest, is introduced, she has oily hands and a giant wrench, which she uses in her "mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines":

https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt

That line just kills me every time I re-read the book – Orwell, a novelist, writing a dystopian future in which novels are written by giant, clanking mechanisms. Later on, when Winston and Julia begin their illicit affair, we get more detail:

She could describe the whole process of composing a novel, from the general directive issued by the Planning Committee down to the final touching-up by the Rewrite Squad. But she was not interested in the finished product. She 'didn't much care for reading,' she said. Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.

I always assumed Orwell was subtweeting his publishers and editors here, and you can only imagine that the editor who asked Orwell to tweak the 1984 manuscript must have felt an uncomfortable parallel between their requests and the notional Planning Committee and Rewrite Squad at the Ministry of Truth.

I first read 1984 in the early winter of, well, 1984, when I was thirteen years old. I was on a family trip that included as visit to my relatives in Leningrad, and the novel made a significant impact on me. I immediately connected it to the canon of dystopian science fiction that I was already avidly consuming, and to the geopolitics of a world that seemed on the brink of nuclear devastation. I also connected it to my own hopes for the nascent field of personal computing, which I'd gotten an early start on, when my father – then a computer science student – started bringing home dumb terminals and acoustic couplers from his university in the mid-1970s. Orwell crystallized my nascent horror at the oppressive uses of technology (such as the automated Mutually Assured Destruction nuclear systems that haunted my nightmares) and my dreams of the better worlds we could have with computers.

It's not an overstatement to say that the rest of my life has been about this tension. It's no coincidence that I wrote a series of "Little Brother" novels whose protagonist calls himself w1n5t0n:

https://craphound.com/littlebrother/Cory_Doctorow_-_Little_Brother.htm

I didn't stop with Orwell, of course. I wrote a whole series of widely read, award-winning stories with the same titles as famous sf tales, starting with "Anda's Game" ("Ender's Game"):

https://www.salon.com/2004/11/15/andas_game/

And "I, Robot":

https://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_I_Robot.html

"The Martian Chronicles":

https://escapepod.org/2019/10/03/escape-pod-700-martian-chronicles-part-1/

"True Names":

https://archive.org/details/TrueNames

"The Man Who Sold the Moon":

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/05/22/the-man-who-sold-the-moon/

and "The Brave Little Toaster":

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212

Writing stories about other stories that you hate or love or just can't get out of your head is a very old and important literary tradition. As EL Doctorow (no relation) writes in his essay "Genesis," the Hebrews stole their Genesis story from the Babylonians, rewriting it to their specifications:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/41520/creationists-by-e-l-doctorow/

As my "famous title" stories and Little Brother books show, this work needn't be confined to antiquity. Modern copyright may be draconian, but it contains exceptions ("fair use" in the US, "fair dealing" in many other places) that allow for this kind of creative reworking. One of the most important fair use cases concerns The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall's 2001 retelling of Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind from the perspective of the enslaved characters, which was judged to be fair use after Mitchell's heirs tried to censor the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suntrust_Bank_v._Houghton_Mifflin_Co.

In ruling for Randall, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals emphasized that she had "fully employed those conscripted elements from Gone With the Wind to make war against it." Randall used several of Mitchell's most famous lines, "but vest[ed] them with a completely new significance":

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/268/1257/608446/

The Wind Done Gone is an excellent book, and both its text and its legal controversy kept springing to mind as I read Sandra Newman's wonderful novel Julia, which retells 1984 from the perspective of Julia, she of the oily hands the novel-writing machine:

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/julia-sandra-newman?variant=41467936636962

Julia is the kind of fanfic that I love, in the tradition of both Wind Done gone and Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead, in which a follow-on author takes on the original author's throwaway world-building with deadly seriousness, elucidating the weird implications and buried subtexts of all the stuff and people moving around in the wings and background of the original.

For Newman, the starting point here is Julia, an enigmatic lover who comes to Winston with all kinds of rebellious secrets – tradecraft for planning and executing dirty little assignations and acquiring black market goods. Julia embodies a common contradiction in the depiction of young women (she is some twenty years younger than Winston): on the one hand, she is a "native" of the world, while Winston is a late arrival, carrying around all his "oldthink" baggage that leaves him perennially baffled, terrified and angry; on the other hand, she's a naive "girl," who "doesn't much care for reading," and lacks the intellectual curiosity that propels Winston through the text.

This contradiction is the cleavage line that Newman drives her chisel into, fracturing Orwell's world in useful, fascinating, engrossing ways. For Winston, the world of 1984 is totalitarian: the Party knows all, controls all and misses nothing. To merely think a disloyal thought is to be doomed, because the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnicompetent Party will sense the thought and mark you for torture and "vaporization."

Orwell's readers experience all of 1984 through Winston's eyes and are encouraged to trust his assessment of his situation. But Newman brings in a second point of view, that of Julia, who is indeed far more worldly than Winston. But that's not because she's younger than him – it's because she's more provincial. Julia, we learn, grew up outside of the Home Counties, where the revolution was incomplete and where dissidents – like her parents – were sent into exile. Julia has experienced the periphery of the Party's power, the places where it is frayed and incomplete. For Julia, the Party may be ruthless and powerful, but it's hardly omnicompetent. Indeed, it's rather fumbling.

Which makes sense. After all, if we take Winston at his word and assume that every disloyal citizen of Oceania is arrested, tortured and murdered, where would that leave Oceania? Even Kim Jong Un can't murder everyone who hates him, or he'd get awfully lonely, and then awfully hungry.

Through Julia's eyes, we experience Oceania as a paranoid autocracy, corrupt and twitchy. We witness the obvious corollary of a culture of denunciation and arrest: the ruling Party of such an institution must be riddled with internecine struggle and backstabbing, to the point of paralyzed dysfunction. The Orwellian trick of switching from being at war with Eastasia to Eurasia and back again is actually driven by real military setbacks – not just faked battles designed to stir up patriotic fervor. The Party doesn't merely claim to be under assault from internal and external enemies – it actually is.

Julia is also perfectly positioned to uncover the vast blank spots in Winston's supposed intellectual curiosity, all the questions he doesn't ask – about her, about the Party, and about the world. I love this trope and used it myself, in Attack Surface, the third "Little Brother" book, which is told from the point of view of Marcus's frenemy Masha:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531/attacksurface

Through Julia, we come to understand the seemingly omniscient, omnipotent Party as fumbling sadists. The Thought Police are like MI5, an Island of Misfit Toys where the paranoid, the stupid, the vicious and the thuggish come together to ruin the lives of thousands, in such a chaotic and pointless manner that their victims find themselves spinning devastatingly clever explanations for their behavior:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460

And, as with Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julia is a first-rate novel, expertly plotted, with fantastic, nail-biting suspense and many smart turns and clever phrases. Newman is doing Orwell, and, at times, outdoing him. In her hands, Orwell – like Winston – is revealed as a kind of overly credulous romantic who can't believe that anyone as obviously stupid and deranged as the state's representatives could be kicking his ass so very thoroughly.

This was, in many ways, the defining trauma and problem of Orwell's life, from his origin story, in which he is shot through the throat by a fascist: sniper during the Spanish Civil War:

https://www.rjgeib.com/thoughts/soldiers/george-orwell-shot.html

To his final days, when he developed a foolish crush on a British state spy and tried to impress her by turning his erstwhile comrades in to her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orwell%27s_list

Newman's feminist retelling of Orwell is as much about puncturing the myth of male competence as it is about revealing the inner life, agency, and personhood of swooning love-interests. As someone who loves Orwell – but not unconditionally – I was moved, impressed, and delighted by Julia.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/28/novel-writing-machines/#fanfic

[sam-keeper]

Hey Look At This Comic: Chainsaw Man and Don't Get Around Much Anymore

this title is so funny. hey you probably haven't heard of this small indie comic, yeah it's pretty obscure it's called Chainsaw Man.

here's an even funnier joke: hey have you heard of this comics guy, name of Art Spiegelman?

before Spiegelman wrote that book you probably know him better for (ha ha he he) he did a lot of other comix, particularly a lot of one page experiments. one in particular stuck with me: Don't Get Around Much Anymore, a simple exploration of a narrator's apartment. there's a lot things Spiegelman does to enhance the sense of stasis, isolation, and depressive gloom in this comic, and the New Yorker a while back published a great summary by Spiegelman of his own techniques. what stuck with me the most was the sense of time out of joint created by his manipulation of narrating text and panel contents. throughout the comic, the text and images are "out of synch [sic]". for many panels, the text describes the image we've just seen rather than being illustrated by the panel it's in. there's even a weird pivot in the middle where we briefly look ahead before getting caught again in the backward flow.

because of the kind of person I am, I flashed back to this comic after reading Chainsaw Man issue 172. in it there's a bunch of moments where speech bubbles and panels also seem to be out of sync. so, I dug DGAMA out again and took a look. actually, I did more than reread it: I followed its soundtrack instructions, "to be read to the accompaniment of a dripping faucet, slowly." I'm trying to do more dumb bullshit that artists tell me to do these days because A. it's not like they're going to squirt me with their rubber flower or get me with the ol' ink around the telescope trick, come on and B. we do all kinds of arbitrary, annoying tasks in order to access an intended artistic experience: we call it "video games".

so I went in the bathroom with my girlfriend's copy of Metamaus, found the page where they reproduce DGAMA, and adjusted the faucet. how slowly to drip? well, if it's too low "slowly" becomes "inaudibly" so nudge it up a bit more. ok, tap... tap... couldn't hear that one... tap... good enough. and I read, and when I got to the panel where the narrator's description lines up with the panel contents, "all the water I can use pours out of the faucet with a flick of the wrist," the faucet made the loudest little "plop" yet. damn. A+ Art.

the reading experience is something like this: where a comic might often get chewed up fast, eyes rushing across the page, this one encourages a kind of juddering, halting back and forth between panels. it's almost got a hypnotic quality, paired with the dripping tap. it's such a simple page, but I found myself weaving back and forth over it many times in order to make sense of all the relations. the schematic representations at the top of the page take on an almost mocking quality--you can piece together the floor plan and how everything fits together, but doing so just pulls you into the comic deeper.

the effect of disjointed time in Chainsaw Man isn't the same, but there's some parallels. I find that I have to reread Tatsuki Fujimoto's action sequences a lot of the time to figure out just what is happening in them. this could be seen as a flaw but I think creates a deliberate sense of chaos. whatever occurs in Chainsaw Man can be understood, but only after the fact. in the moment events just occur, then we are invited to dissect the aftermath like crime scene investigators.

for that kind of effect, the disorienting pairing of seemingly out of sync words and drawings works perfectly. Fujimoto likes action sequences that don't linger on the tweens, jumping instead from impact to impact to impact. (this contrasts his dialogue scenes which often incorporate pauses and repeated static panels.) in the page here, a devil whose deal I can't be bothered to remember says "I dodged it!" only to realize that their head's been cut off. only, that's not really right, is it? the speech bubble is "I dodged it!" but in the panel the killing blow has already been struck. the speech bubble, as in Spiegelman's comic, seems to be lagging a bit behind the action. look at the two page splash too: if we're inclined to read the action the same way we read the rest of the comic, right to left, we arrive on the right hand of the page, where the action has already completed. we don't follow Chainsaw Man's trajectory but instead focus on where he already is, reconstructing the violence as we pass back across the rest of the page. to me, the skipping of intermediate moments, the page compositions, and this disunity between text and image, invites something similar to the passing back and forth over panels that we see in DGAMA.

is it that deep? if you think about this I suppose you can conclude "this is the character dying before they know it" which, sure, though I think that raises some interesting questions like "how do you get a whole sentence out with a severed windpipe and vocal cords". there's a moment later on when some dude is like "you guys! get behind me!" as, again, the panel shows his head and arms flying off. I guess there's a pretty established convention in manga and anime at this point of allowing gravity to be as weak as it needs, in order to let someone say as much as they want while their limbs are flying off, not unlike opera's convention of having someone get stabbed and then stand up to sing an aria with the sword still sticking out of their lungs.

nevertheless, I think it feels experientially distinct when you have a static image, ostensibly representing a unit of time, and the panel contents are this transparently incompatible. a more interesting way of looking at it is: death comes so fast for these characters that the comic can't keep up. it's not the speech but the speech bubbles that are out of joint here, the action leaving its medium behind. it's a radically different end effect than the one Spiegelman aims for, and is a lot less ready for the cover of The New Yorker, but the underlying principle of decoupling word and image in order to create a sense of time not quite functioning correctly remains the same.

if you wanted to achieve this in film, what could you do? maybe desync the audio track? it's an interesting possibility, though one I think a lot of viewers would experience as a transcoding error rather than an intended effect. or you could do something like the astonishing sequence in the most recent episode of The Elusive Samurai where, like Chainsaw Man, intermediate actions are removed so that a character is abruptly standing next to a bunch of headless corpses blooming blood flowers in slow motion. there's ways to capture something of the energy of Fujimoto's work.

...I don't think the anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man really tries, for the most part. both the slow awkwardness of conversations with their static compositions, and the way the action tends to skip clear movement for noise and destructive aftermath, aren't really suited to the style of high budget blockbuster anime, which wants to pack the screen with little movements, as though to make sure the money is visible with each frame, all the ones accounted for. the adaptation has largely opted to look as good as possible all the time, for a given value of good, in a way that I think loses a lot of the grungy charm of the comic.

even the most suited adaptation, though, would still lack one of the fundamental qualities of the comic page: its altogetherness, its arthrology as Thierry Groensteen terms it, its nature as a bunch of panels in a metaframe, taken in at a glance, or pages easily flipped back and forth across. it's this that allows us to pass back and forth over the page like we're reconstructing the calamity from the evidence after the fact.

this post originally ran on Cohost on August 19, 2024. you can read more reviews in the Hey Look At This Comic tag and support me on Patreon.