#unreality discussion

[pillowspace]

hello. i am. perhaps 👉👈 interested in that au art with the verry sleepy looking sif. would you. maybe be open to sharing what its about?

Sleepy Sif <3 sure, I sorta just made it up on the spot after I had already finished sketching, but it kinda stuck with me. Here's extra dialogue that I was going to draw, but I got tired:

Basically, it's an AU where Siffrin never left the island north of Vauguard. The people there are like ghosts, going through routines while never processing much of anything, while the country itself is like a hazy dreamscape you can't quite focus on without it all falling apart. Loop serves as an anchor, keeping Siffrin the most coherent out of anyone on the island, though Siffrin is still forgetful and, as you said, sleepy.

I know that Siffrin's king, but I can't decide what they were previously. If he lived a normal life and Loop just went "you're the closest to a person out of anyone here, why shouldn't we live in luxury?" Or if he was already a prince before the island stopped existing. Either sounds interesting. Regardless, it's not like Siffrin would remember though.

Isabeau ends up on the island due to some incident with a boat and a storm I suppose, no one can really choose to go there on purpose. Maybe the others also came along, Isabeau just hasn't found them on the island yet.

Since the island is being held to reality with flimsy tape and Siffrin's been entirely alone outside of Loop's company and villages of unseeing eyes, Siffrin unconsciously sways the island into being inescapable, dreading when they'll leave while still trying to be supportive. Since Siffrin seems to have such a fierce but melancholy bond to their home, no one's really gathered the will to ask if he wants to go with them yet.

That's the general idea! I also like to imagine different colours come and go on the island, but red's always there. Sometimes the grass is grey, sometimes the grass is green. Etc.

[deputyrook]

David Dastmalchian -> The Most Iconic Horror Movie Monsters | Roundtable Discussion

[ace-and-ranty]

My one contribution to the Goncharov Phenomena is, I’ve seen people comment on how Tumblr only managed to have a nuanced conversation about a piece of media when the piece of media doesn’t exist, but...

I can’t help but think. It just isn’t the same people.

The people who bother to make memes examining the complexity of Goncharov are the same people who enjoy examining the complexity of actual media, who have been here doing that forever, who already knew how to handle a subtle take.

It’s just that the people who would usually come crashing in and derail the whole thing aren’t saying anything, because, well, faking nuanced interpretation is fun for its own sake, but faking moral outrage isn’t. 

I don’t think it’s so much that Tumblr finally learned how to handle a nuanced take, I think it’s more that the fakeness of Goncharov automatically filters out people who can’t  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[kaet-draws]

vergil is my dress up doll and i get to put him in ffxiv gear and pose him using samurai skills

bonus pic under readmore

not immune to giving him v's tattoos for no reason other than i like it

[valtsv]

if you dont mind sharing, can you talk more about your experience being haunted?

well it was definitely influenced by my paranoid delusions, but after i watched the chernobyl hbo miniseries back when it came out i developed this fixation on the idea that i was being haunted by the judgemental spectres of the real people who'd died in that disaster. it was so real to me that i couldn't even take a shower without feeling like they were in there with me somehow, just silently watching. i started showering in my clothes and barely slept at night because i was certain that there were eyes on me as i lay there, crowded around me. i hardly left the house because i couldn't bear to bring this congregation of ghosts i'd gathered anywhere and try to pretend that nothing was wrong.

i was terrified and visibly unwell but i didn't feel like i could tell anyone or it'd be a betrayal somehow. i didn't think the ghosts would harm me if i did, i wasn't scared that they had any ill intentions towards me at all, but i felt so unbearably guilty at the idea of exposing them to anyone and forcing them to be a spectacle. i think that might have been what induced the delusion in the first place; my guilt at participating in that spectacle (ironic considering i'm obsessed with the terror now, and historical rpf is an ethical minefield but hardly the root of all evil). that and a combination of extreme stress and isolation convincing me that my entire flat was haunted because i would hear noises at night with no discernable source coming from the other rooms - voices and music and activity, despite all my roommates being on holiday and denying anything when i asked them.

i didn't know what they wanted from me, but i eventually started to try to accept that it was irrational to feel so much guilt for an event that happened before i was even born and had no possible way of preventing or changing the outcome of, and the haunted feeling stopped bothering me so much. that's why i think that ghosts are psychological manifestations of emotion, especially guilt and grief. you can be haunted without it necessarily being supernatural in nature. and to me, those ghosts were real and very much present. they were never visible, but their presence was overwhelming. it feels like an insult to myself to deny that they had a real effect on me, even if they were just a delusion, and that's what a ghost is to me.

[earlgraytay]

in all seriousness though I think the thing I love most about the Goncharov meme is the way it lets Tumblr people play with both the pretentiousness/inaccessibility of film crit and the over-fandomization/misunderstandings that Tumblr likes to bring to media crit in general

affectionately mocking the tendency of Serious Film Criticism to see symbols and recognize patterns that the author may or may not have intended, as well as Serious Film Crit's tendency to mark any moments of homoeroticism as being Meant As Symbolism!!!1! even if it's, like, overtly psychosexual Hannibal nonsense

while also affectionately mocking Tumblr seizing on any film that's even the tiniest bit gay and going "these are our blorbos now", misunderstanding/eliding obvious symbolism in favour of The Gay Reading, turning any evil lesbian into a #girlboss, etc etc etc

@speculativefictions has been inventing out of whole cloth a Goncharov-themed Supernatural episode and a Goncharov-themed Riverdale episode and playing with those fandoms' patterns of analysis

(most notably a) analyzing the DeanCas subtext in Everything and b) ascribing a huge amount of intentionality to whatever the fuck is going on in Riverdale)

It's really great to see both the affectionate digs and the loving homage to two different styles of film crit that are genuinely fundamentally compatible, but that you don't normally see in the same place on Tumblr

[bandtrees]

Annoying fandom people when you tell them characters do things based on writers’ decisions and biases and are not fully autonomous sapient beings they’re watching in a terrarium

[sylvianfoxart]

I want my art to be Hozier-coded not in a ‘ooh bog man’ way, but in a ‘discussing important socio-political concepts in a beautiful and incredibly meaningful way while using a long history of other meaningful media to express such concepts even to the extent of taking media that may not have originated for that purpose and using it to further illustrate one’s point for the sake of one’s audience’

[quarsonist]

reminder that you're not a true ally if you don't support erbidies <3

erbidy is the only part of the world which is predominantly queer and queerness is a huge part of its culture. by being anti-erbidy you're giving into conservatives' ideas that people who are different in any way should be eradicated.

also eating people is cultural for erbidies, it's part of their lifestyle?? lots of other animals eat their own species, they just have to survive? if you have the time to bicker about people halfway across the world trying to stay alive then you should check your privilege

[cleolinda]

I haven't sat up and waited until midnight for something in a long while, so that was fun.

When I listen to something new, a few songs will snag on my brain--purely on a musical level, it's not really about lyrics at that point if I can even understand them--and then we go into the "I'm autistic, I listen to one (1) song at a time on repeat, see you in a week" stage. (Okay, I might rotate 2-3.) Like, Unreal Unearth will probably be Enrichment in My Enclosure for a good month or two; I'm still wringing the dopamine out of "De Selby (Part 2)." I am extremely hashtag-blessed to have had five whole months to chew on the six singles we got, as it is.

For whatever reason, "Who We Are" up there was the one that really caught my ear last night. Like I just started smiling to myself: that's the one. There were others--including the very last song, which is astounding--but I went, yeah, this is the one going straight to repeat.

One of the fun things about the way I listen to music is that sometimes songs just don't snag for me until many listens, or many months, or many years later. I wrote about Florence + the Machine's "Howl" turning out to be my most-played song on Apple Music--it didn't seem all that great to me for the first seven listens or so, and then suddenly it was The Song. Songs turn into little oracles; they wait and talk to me when I need to hear them.

(If you've had that happen--a song that seemed Just Okay suddenly hitting for you, chime in--I'm curious.)

(So... Hozier just sounds like that, huh. Because I know this man is not using autotune. He just wakes up and sounds like that.)

[a-dragons-journal]

not everyone experiencing a delusion recognizes it’s a delusion. nice to know you’re just sanist tho.

I assume that this is about the “so endels are okay but p-shifters aren’t?” ask from the other day?

Assuming so: I recognize that, and it’s unfortunate, but you (general you, not you specifically) can’t get away with making whatever claims you want by saying “but some of the people saying it might be experiencing a delusion about it without realizing,” because then no one can criticize any claim ever, and that’s not a sustainable world.

If you make a claim about objective, physical, shared reality, then people have the right to challenge that claim, and you should be able to provide evidence - and if you can’t, you’re either lying or you’re just wrong, whatever the source of the wrongness is (which might be a delusion, or might not be). And it is not morally wrong to be wrong, but it’s still incorrect. This is especially important when the claim is associated with beliefs and/or behavior that’s directly harmful to other people - which is demonstrably true of p-shifters, both in the sense of the history of using p-shifting claims to manipulate people by promising to teach them how it’s done, and in the sense of untagged unreality directly harming delusional people. You can’t, for instance, excuse someone claiming the COVID vaccine is actually dangerous and a conspiracy theory by the US government to kill [x group of people] by saying, “well, but some of those people might be experiencing a delusion that that’s real, so challenging their belief and pointing out the harm it’s doing is sanist!”, or at least I hope we agree that that’s a bad plan. (P-shifting isn’t quite as directly harmful as that example, but it illustrates my point.)

EDIT: And just for the record - if you (general or specific, as appropriate) have a constructed counter argument here as to why I actually am being accidentally ableist here, please do hit me with it, genuinely. I am not immune to errors and I’ve misstepped on the front of how to handle and talk about delusions before. I am not immune to “get his ass” when appropriate.

[0h-ch0o-ch0o]

on this 1st anniversary of unreal unearth, we receive hozier yapping onstage for 10 minutes about hitting his head (and cillian murphy) while likely on an ungodly amount of cold meds.

[loveandthings11]

!!! Jeremy with Stephen Colbert again!!! 🙌🏻❤️❤️

[bookwyrminspiration]

my college professor has one of my sideblog urls now so she can grade my tumblr posting for fandom class. and i'm not even joking

[spookcataloger]

Send my child to a better reality (2012)

[valtsv]

watched inception again tonight and i'm so obsessed with the implied world this movie builds that we never actually get to see. dream sharing was invented for military training purposes but has since apparently moved into the mainstream enough that people use it to design architecture and commit crimes - do people who regularly engage in shared dreaming risk becoming desensitized to things like pain and violence and death because they experience it so much in the dream world? what are some of the other applications of shared dreaming? is it treated like virtual reality? is there, say, dream torture interrogation? dream-based entertainment, providing experiences reality can't? and then there's the implication that dream theft is common enough that high-level criminal organizations build themselves around it and people can receive training to allow their subconscious mind to defend itself (at least, if they're influential and/or wealthy enough). are dream crimes a recognized thing? is there such thing as dream laws? could you make a court case out of things that happened in a dream in the inception universe, or is it a legal loophole because if if happened in a dream it wasn't technically real (no matter how real it felt) and that's why people exploit it? also, regularly engaging with the dream world in favor of real life is shown to have the potential to be addictive and to affect your perception of reality, particularly whether your world and everyone in it is real or not. is this something that's widely recognized and can you get support for it? or is this kept quiet and/or stigmatized in order to promote progress and profit? i desperately need to see more of the world nolan created with this film because it's all just so fucking fascinating to think about