#tragi-comical

[magentagalaxies]

aubrey update!!!

doing the monologue in my standup class went well overall! i was very nervous bc 1. i'm not a standup person 2. this is the first time i said most of these jokes out loud and only the second time i've performed aubrey in front of people. my legs were literally shaking at first so i decided instead to sit down in a gay-people-sitting-weird-in-chairs way which felt MUCH more natural so honestly i think i'll keep it? might do some movement but like. how dare you make aubrey stand ze just wants to chat. if i can pin my wig nicely i might even dip upside down i think that would be fun

material got a good response! everyone said it was very tightly written like it's clear i've been writing this for a long time (and i have. i have like 200+ pages of aubrey material, these were some of the highlights). the chia pet thing didn't get as much of a laugh as it usually does when i bring it up in conversation but i think that was a timing thing. the joke that got the most laughs was the one i do about when uncle reg (aubrey's gay-uncle) says something about HRT being dangerous and aubrey's like "you did cocaine when you were my age" and it goes into a whole bit about comparing HRT to coke which is very fun. probably my favorite joke in the set but i was insecure if allys would be uncomfortable with the comparison, but since people liked it i'm like ok cool i can go even further in this direction.

main note that i need to work on was since it was so tightly written i wasn't giving the audience time to get the jokes (which is what led to there not being a ton of laughs despite people liking it). and that was definitely because i was nervous/not memorized (we didn't have to be for this assignment) so i was staring at my phone rather than at the audience. and yeah i really wish i was able to embody aubrey more and make it a more relaxed tone even with the tight writing, but that's a thing i'll work on throughout the class so by the end i'll definitely be more secure in it

tho honestly the most encouraging piece of feedback was like. any time someone does character standup the professor is like "awesome! now could you see yourself slotting that in between either regular standup as yourself or other character pieces?" (bc the final for this class is each person gets a 20 minute set at a local club) and honestly i can, but like. i have so much aubrey stuff and i'm so much more comfortable doing standup as zir than as myself (plus that wig takes time to put on correctly so that might be an awkward switch) and one of my fellow-standup-students went "i could actually see you filling a full 20 minutes with just aubrey. like this monologue felt like i was listening to the audio version of a sitcom" and oh my god that made me feel so good!!! aubrey isn't a one-bit character (not that there's anything wrong with one-bit characters since there are some of those in the other standups' sets), people wanna know what other stuff ze gets into and i can use zir to express all my other standup experiments!!!

so overall. nervewracking but i'm very glad i did it!! excited to eventually do my 20 minute aubrey set and be able to share it with you all

[crusheswhimsandfancies]

Listening to this today and omg I love the lyrics! I’m Old Enough To Be Your Zaide😳🥴 and Kiss My Mezuzah are my faves, obviously🫦 very saucy!

But then!!! Oh no!

“Go on just step inside

Or if not, I’ll just kiss my own mezuzah

I’m resilient, I can always retrench

Blessed am I, for always standing by

The needs of this fine, available, attractive,

Secure, well-rounded, intelligent lonely mensch”

That just breaks my heart😭😭😭 even if it isn’t about him, I feel like it’s close to the bone💔

[lackadaisycats]

Would you consider Lackadaisy to be 'Noir'?

It has some noir-like elements, and I borrow some of the visual sensibilities of noir for certain comic panels after Volume 1, but not consistently so.

You might say the old guard of characters (Mitzi, Viktor, Zib, Wick, and Mordecai) have been tossed into a noir phase of their lives, what with the murder and fatalism and the 'what's going on here, exactly?' angles. But there's counter-focus on Rocky, Freckle, and Ivy, where the levity and romanticism tend to overshadow the cynicism, enough that I don't think Lackadaisy really qualifies as noir. It's maybe part noir, part screwball, part slapstick, tragi-comic, farcical gangster fare? I don't know. You decide.

[drvnkd4zed]

Enhypen reacting to drunk Y/n

♡ Jungwon

Jungwon is probably the responsible one, he will prevent you from drinking too much. He'll be all smiles and jokes but when he senses you're going too far, he'd get serious and glance at you frightfully. Jungwon would think you're cute when you're drunk, but still he will tease you imitating the way you were speaking/dancing/etc while you were drunk.

♡ Heeseung

Heeseung would laugh the whole time at the things you say, probably shocked by how different you are when you're drunk. I'm also 100% sure he'll start a karaoke, turning up the volume of the music so that you'll sing even more tragically. Even though he has fun seeing you in such tragi-comic conditions, he is very careful and he would take good care of you. He would carry you on his back, leaving you on your bed and make sure you sleep peacefully.

♡ Jay

Jay's the type to feel embarassed and disappointed (in a funny way actually), he'd be staring at you saying and doing things out of this world. He'd literally count all the times you take sips from the glass and eventually would say "It's time to stop" when he sees you being on the edge. At the end of the night, he'll grab you by your waist making sure you won't fall and lead you to your room. Jay will sit by your side until you fall asleep and leave a kiss on your forehead, then he'd go to sleep too.

♡ Jake

I think Jake would start asking you random questions like "how many days are in November?" just to see how far gone you are. He also knows your limits, so when he sees you're exaggerating he'd just hide the bottles and stop you for drinking more. Even though you'd try to persuade him, saying "one last sip", he'll reply with a firm "no". Just kidding, if you say it multiple times he might buy it and hand you the bottle (because he can't resist you!). In the case you fall asleep on his shoulder, he's not moving by an inch for until you wake up. He'd ultimately cover you with his clothes so you won't feel cold.

♡ Sunghoon

Sunghoon would just face palm himself a hundred of times while laughing. Expect him to use ALL the things you say against you when you'll be sober again (he might also make them more tragic). He would also make up scenarios that never happened just to make you feel more embarassed in front of the others. I think he'd have a lot of fun tho, he'd state something like "You should drink more often".

♡ Sunoo

Sunoo might actually be scared of you as he's seen too many scary movies with drunk people, but then he'll just try to steal the bottle from you. He's willing to help you in case you feel sick, but he'll be like "I told you this would happen" the whole time. Another thing he'd do if you feel sick is panicking, he's warned you that you'd regret drinking so much and he'd probably call his mom crying and asking for help. He will eventually let you lay on the sofa and sleep beside you, even if it's uncomfortable.

♡ Niki

This kid would start a fucking alcohol contest with you where the one who drinks the most wins (luckily the other members won't let that happen). Niki would film you through the whole time just to make some random funny edits about you and post them on the chat with enhypen. I'm also pretty sure he'd make many pranks on you, like making you balancing on a pile of books just to see you fall. Expect him to be the first one to serve the drinks, he has so much fun when you get drunk.

[alexandramrobertson]

A modest entry to Canadian Six Degrees

A very small part, basically a cameo.

In Barney's Version (2010), the main character is a television producer for a Mountie soap opera called O'Malley of the North.

Guess who plays the Mountie?

I love Paul's expressions in his second scene.

The film is tragi-comic, with a heartbreaking ending. It's streaming for free on CBC Gem, which you might need to be in Canada to access.

@ds30below

[tomwaitsvisualdictionary]

Forty years ago, Tom Waits’ transformative creative breakthrough, Swordfishtrombones, was released into the wild, ushering in a new and critically acclaimed era for Waits and his longtime songwriting and production partner, Kathleen Brennan.

To honor this metamorphic period, Waits’ spectacular middle-period albums – released on Island Records between 1983 and 1993 – have been newly remastered from the original tapes for reissue on vinyl and CD via Island/UMe, personally overseen by Waits and Brennan.  Swordfishtrombones (1983), its sprawling and superb sequel, Rain Dogs (1985), and the trilogy-completing, tragi-comic stage musical, Franks Wild Years (1987), kick off the series today with their new vinyl releases.

[mybeingthere]

Travelling Tales

Kalīlah wa-Dimnah and the Animal Fable

By Marina Warner

Influencing numerous later animal tales told around the world, the 8th-century Arabic fables of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ’s Kalīlah wa-Dimnah also inspired a rich visual tradition of illustration: jackals on trial, airborne turtles, and unlikely alliances between species. Marina Warner follows these stories as they wander and change across time and place, celebrating their sharp political observation and stimulating mix of humour, earnesty, and melancholy.

Kalīlah and Dimnah are two jackals, wily and ambitious, one virtuous and the other rather less so, who give their names to the eponymous cycle of animal fables in Arabic that is framed by the stories of their friendship, adventures, and mishaps.1 The collection bears a family likeness to Aesop’s Fables and to other classics of moral exempla, but the volumes vary one from one another and even when the stories coincide, they aren’t identical. They share certain generic features: animal protagonists above all (lions, wolves, monkeys, asses, mice, magpies); a narrative of braided tales passing between speakers, often imbricating one story inside the other; and a prevailing tone of tragi-comic moralising coupled with world-weary wisdom about the folly and the treachery of humans.

Most of all, the story of the two jackals Kalīlah and Dimnah, and the tales told in the course of their adventures, are travelling tales, which have been travelling for a long while, migrating from language to language, culture to culture, religion to religion. The Arabic stories’ rich history ranges from Benares to Baghdad and Basra and Rome and beyond, appearing in numerous iterations over centuries, moving across borders, carrying the sparkling hope and mordant cynicism, the canniness and the wit of a form of wisdom literature that originated in the Sanskrit Panchatantra (The Five Books, or Five Discourses) and the Mahabharata, sometime in the second century BCE. Two significant branches grew from this trunk: first, a collection often attributed to a legendary Indian sage, known as Bidpay or Pilpay, and second, the Arabic branch, beginning in the eighth century with the work of the scholar Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. 139/757), who translated and compiled Kalīlah wa-Dimnah. Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ worked from a lost Pehlevi (Middle Persian) composition by a writer called Barzahwayh, which he treated freely, mixing into the Panchatantra’s original fables four more tales, and a highly circumstantial and persuasive explanation of how the manuscript was obtained; he also added a crucial dramatic chapter about Dimnah’s trial, self-defence, and ultimate punishment.

Read the whole essay https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/travelling-tales/

[hostilemuppet]

It was some of the best angst I've read in a while, especially in a fic that's mostly comedy based. 10/10

IM SO GLAD........ the switch from "brief comedic summaries" to "mild prose" wasnt something that we exactly planned it just kinda worked out like that, and im so relieved that people actually like the way it reads 😭 i wouldnt really say im a "writer" but id LIKE to be and im glad im headed in the right direction! weve got a loooooot planned, both tragi and comic, and i hope you all like everything weve got planned!

[goobie-goobert]

Mewing spig bc I forgot to post this @tragi-comical

[classicalshorts]

Are you feeling CERULEAN or are you LIVID?

Welcome to Cool Colours (with a Classics flavour) entry III. You have probably already guessed that these words come from ancient words denoting colours, in this case shades of blue.

Cerulean denotes a sky-blue. However, its ancient parent word could refer to a sky-blue, or a shade darker, even a blue-green. It comes from the lovely Latin adjective caeruleus, which may be connected to the Latin word for heaven or sky, caelum. A beautiful reference that uses the word in ancient literature can be found in Virgil's stunning poem about farming, The Georgics. Virgil describes one of the zones of the sky as 'rigid with blue ice (caerulea glacie)'.

Lividus, the parent word of 'livid' also denotes a shade of blue, but a much darker blue-black. One can see how it has come to become a virtual synonym for 'angry'. The original Latin adjective also carries negative connotations, but of being spiteful and malicious.

Now I have not a coronet in tonight's final hue (sorry, mad Sherlock Holmes fan), but it is a word I am fond of, namely Beryl, a pale green or blue, deriving via Latin beryllus from Greek βήρυλλος (beryllos). In a tragi-comic elegy, poet Propertius imagines the ghost of lover Cynthia visiting him, still wearing her beryl ring. Any keen chemists reading this will spot the connection to the element beryllium.

Despite the many Greek and Latin words that adorn our sweet language of English, English is actually a Germanic language. The word 'blue' finds its origins in blau.

So if you are blue with cold, you are feeling cerulean or feeling cross, you are LIVID.

More on cool colours and Classics soon.

Happy New Year's Eve.

[harringroveheart]

Would you like to write MTIAB from Steve’s point of view?

I would like to, but I can't.

I gave it a shot (ficlet here) when I first started, but I find Steve's voice really difficult to get right? I'm actually in awe of people who can write fic from Steve's POV. I was providing a very unnecessarily long-winded answer to a comment on ao3 just the other day about how tricky Steve's character motivations are and how he takes a tragi-comically long time to figure himself out/act on his feelings--and how that means he's always a step behind/out of sync with everyone/the plot.

Basically, if I wrote the fic from Steve's POV it would be 2x as long but purely because of Steve's mental exposition while he tries to understand what the fuck is happening and why it's all going wrong and what he actually wants....aaaaand it would be boring.

[anisecandy]

Comics or movie or both for any of these (except Peter B. bc afaik he's the only Peter B. we've got atm): Eddie Brock, Venom, Peter Parker, Peter B. Parker, and Deadpool for blorbo bingo please 🙏

Gosh, that's quite a few blorbos!! Okay, lemme go through them one by one...

Eddie Brock, Sonyverse (bc I've already did comic!Eddie here)

He's the one character I was completly meh on, but his popularity in the fandom is making me dislike him, because ofc I cannot escape him in realation to anything Venom. "Ohhh he's so weird an quirkyyy" shut up, comic Eddie would eat him and clean his teeth with his vocal chords.

...sorry, that was needlessly mean.

Works well in what they were trying to do with him in the movie. Personally, I couldn't care less.

Venom (like Venom Symbiote? I assume Venom Symbiote)

Comic:

"Oh, but Anise," I hear you say, "How can Venom Symbiote, the star character of Venom comics and a major Spider-man villian/ally/ex/it's complicated be underrated and don't have enough canon?"

How often it's perspective is the focus. How often the Symbiote is explored and developed as a character. How often it gets to be the main character of the story and not just a cool suit.

It deserves so much better than this.

Movie:

...look I just wasn't that enamored with Venom movies. Their Symbiote is okay. They are fun. More fun than Eddie, but work well with him. The fact they betrayed their whole kind for one sweaty loser? Hilarious.

Anyway.

Peter Parker (comic)

So the thing with Peter is that he scares me.

I'm not a hardcore Spider-man fan. The amount of comics simply horrifies me and induces a freeze reaction in me. I know Peter, but do I really know Peter? Who's to say. I don't dare sharing strong opinins about him, because there's a high chance I might be wrong and totally misguided.

Also I want the endgame Spider-man ship to be Peter x forever singlehood. I think that would be the funniest option on the table, given how much he gets around. Everybody around him settles down and has their neat little lives except for Peter, who gets banned from all polycules. That's what I mean by potting against them. I think that would be hilarious.

Peter B. Parker

Oh god, I am so, so sorry. I like Peter! He's really, really neat! I like him a lot! It's just not the brainrot level of liking, you know? I think he was written very well, and works great in both movies. I guess I'd like to see more of him in the second one, but that's about it. Nothing I would change there.

Great job! Great Peter!

Deadpool (I mean he' pretty similar in both comics and the movies, no?)

Now, I'm not up to date with what Wade has going around currently, so I might be off base! But here's the thing; I personally like Wade best when he's a tragic character in a semi-serious setting. I really liked the early Wade where he's straight up unsettligh at times, and you can really see that under the mask of humor and sillyness there's a real, hurting, BAD person. When it's a tragi-comedy. No cartoon logic, no lol so random humor, little fourth wall breaking. Actual human drama, with real stakes and character arc. For me, Wade is best when he tries to be a better person, but struggles so, so, SO hard because he just isn't, and messes up, and hates himself, and tries again, and again, and again. Over the years, Deadpool became more of a meme character; if it's funny, it's gonna happen! And while it's not BAD, and there's nothing wrong with liking the more comedic approach to the character, that's just not the version of him I enjoy the most.

[stylecouncil]

noel gallagher and brett anderson win every hypothetical britpop (😞) poll in my heart because of sheer comparative amounts of cunt given. I know people often talk about the 60s/70s revival of 90s fashion but what about noel gallagher and brett anderson bringing back the 70s tragi-comic cunt pose. mastering the art of the hostile interview once again.

[alteredsilicone]

I know there is that really nice and heartfelt post about the Solaris finding out about Tenno, but I'm also thinking how LD only talks to you in operator (and now drifter) form and she's so casual about it and also she's hanging in the backrooms with Eudi and Biz so I wanna know if LD just kept it a secret from them or if she was all what, you didn't know? so it becomes less tragic and more tragi-comical I guess.

Or just absurd.

[angelinthefire]

Irt your post about baseline prejudices the writers take as a joke, what's your approach to dealing with it when writing fics? I find myself sometimes struggling with this especially if im writing fix-its because it's quite literally impossible to address Everything, but at the same time I don't want to just leave the show as is. I mean, i feel this way about huge plot things like Gadreel too, but i think its a tiny bit easier to decide if those are necessary to adress to the specific fic rather than things that happen in a single episode or are brushed off as a joke. Like there are some things I just pretty much erase because to me at least there is no meaningful way I think I could interrogate it in a friggin destiel fic without essentially reproducing the shows prejudices like Busty Asian Beauties for example, but there are other things where I'm like...I should probably address this, right? But I just don't know what the line is. I know there will never be one definitive answer to this but i was just curious if you had any principles you follow in your writing.

That's a good question. Imo it's about prioritizing how important the issue is to the characterization, and how important it is to you as a writer.

Like to use the casual objectification of women as an example.

I'd say you can absolutely ignore Busty Asian Beauties. But I say that because it's a dumb gag that doesn't actually add anything to the characterization. I'd also ignore gags about pie, or "Agent Beyonce" or any other running gags that are silly and over-the-top.

But you can't just ignore the casual objectification of women. I've read fic where Dean is suddenly a bit too enlightened, or where he seems to clearly be used as a mouthpiece for the writer who's trying to retcon his change in attitude in a single paragraph. And that doesn't work, imo. Like if you want to totally revamp Dean's attitude towards women, go ahead, write what you want, but the characterization is going to feel off.

You could just write around it, just never have the characters in a situation where it comes up. Or you could have it be an explicit deliberate point in the plot or character development. (I've read a couple of fics that do this with Dean's alcoholism, deciding to take seriously something that is treated very casually on the show, and building a fic around it).

I thought about this when I was writing Life Skills and what I ended up doing was actually less about Dean's characterization and more about the narrative approach itself. Like on the show, especially in earlier seasons, there's a habit of treating sexual partners very superficially, like the narrative doesn't see them as real people, and very much just as a prop for the characters to have sex with. So I did my best to make the three main sexual partners seem like real people, with different quirks and behaviours and styles. So I didn't interrogate anything, and Dean was the same (maybe leaning more towards horny-but-respectful than towards outright objectifying, but still). I just didn't do what the show would have done. And I think it worked okay, and I didn't feel bad about it.

I may or may not get to actually writing it, but I've been trying to plot out a meanstiel fic based on the premise "what if the narrative treated honey!Cas with respect?" And I guess I'm taking a similar approach as to Life Skills in that I'm not addressing the show's ablism head-on (because that's the underlying problem of honey!Cas. That mental illness is just treated like a tragi-comic narrative tool and not, like, an actual thing. And like someone can just bootstrap themselves out of it. (Also this is making me remember "Sam Interrupted" and holy hell that was an awful episode)) and I'm just trying to reframe it instead. Instead of the narrative treating it like, "there's something wrong with Cas and that's funny/sad/a plot point", I'd treat it like, the way Cas experiences the world and communicates has changed, and there's new difficulties, but that doesn't make him less human. Like the characters aren't going to behave terribly differently (at least initially, anyways)(and except for my aversion to over-the-top silliness), they all still start with their same behaviours and attitudes, but my baseline assumption is different from that of the show, and that in itself shapes the narrative. If you know what I mean.

The initial post was more about things like Gadreel (or April, or Becky, etc.) Like I've read a bunch of fics that frame Cas' experience with April as traumatic for him. And I feel like you can do that in a fic that takes place immediately after that experience, based on the premise of "what if spn took consent seriously?" and treating it very deliberately. I don't feel like it works to have a fic that takes place years later, and is generally about something else, but at some point Cas' experience with April comes up and it's treated as traumatic. It feels like in that case, Cas' character development would have been set on a somewhat different path from April onwards, that the reader doesn't get to see, and it's a somewhat different version of Cas than the one we know from the show. If that makes sense? It's a ret-con.

I guess to sum it up, I would take the characters as they're presented on the show, and not ret-con in any additional angst or changes in attitude or anything like that. But I'd recontextualize them to whatever degree I feel is necessary.

[iindex]

The Incidence of Oxymorons

Alone together at last, I told her how I thought that – in my unbiased opinion – the incidence of oxymorons in the English language had been growing smaller.

That's old news, she said, claiming it had been the case for almost exactly ten years. Strongly-held convictions were thrown across the room. Things got pretty ugly.

But this felt strangely normal; ours was a bittersweet relationship, a tragi-comic civil war of violent agreements and deafening silences, going nowhere.

Brian Bilston