the-last-red-hot-swamis - Tumblr blog

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No but the Hunger Games really said "what do you hate more- the atrocities or the people who commit them against you? Because like it or not there IS a difference. If you hate the people who commit acts of pure evil more than you hate the acts themselves, what will stop you from becoming just like your enemies in your pursuit of justice? What will keep you from commiting those very same acts against THEM when the opportunity arises? And what then? The cycle of pain and suffering will never stop. Round and round it'll go. Nothing will ever change. But. BUT. If you hate the atrocities. If you hate the vile, senseless acts MORE than you hate the people who did them to you. If you are able to see that evil is evil regardless of who does it... The cycle ends with you. No, you may never get justice. But you will never be responsible for making others, even your enemies, suffer the same crimes you have. The atrocities will never be committed by you, never by your hand. And that's the way you change the world. It's the ONLY way" and that's why I am sure it will never stop being one of the most relevant works of fiction ever created

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I always laugh when people paint Peeta as a soft, innocent, almost a push over type of guy. Like this boy was eating Katniss up in arguments, making innuendos while on his deathbed, and beating up guys if they threaten his girl. Like come on now.

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Divergent was mine

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I finished reading the hunger games trilogy. So 2 essays about the hunger games are coming soon. The political commentary of the hunger games, and Katniss Everdeen is aromatic. Stay tuned on my blog!

[the-last-red-hot-swamis]

So a while back we were re-watching "The Last Unicorn" when my sister pointed out that in the beginning, Amalthea was still walking like a unicorn! Wait, what, rewind that.

She was! The way she moved her ankles and feet like hooves.

Later she turns her forehead first when Haggard walks toward her.

This was so cool to see the animators consider this character is a UNICORN IN THE SHAPE OF A WOMAN, so she moves her human body like a unicorn!

Great detail work/acting from the animation team! Here's to the "Monster Turned Into a Human Trope"

Ariel from the Little Mermaid tring to figure out legs.

Sisu from Raya and The Last Dragon crawling around all over the place.

Finally, the irony of Demona, a gargoyle who hates humans, taking to being human like a fish to water.

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First time working with DPNs lets fucking GOOO

I've literally never used them before in my life but I've decided to knit the sleeves on my jumper with DPNs as a way to break up the monotony of knitting such a simple jumper and they're a little fiddly but so is a magic loop and I'm slowly getting the hang of them

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i would kick the fucking shit out of this butterfly. life is sacred but this motherfucker needs to die

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Things in movies/shows/stuff on YouTube that freaked me tf out as a kid Pt. 1

The Ello Gov’nor + Death Bear episodes from Regular Show (2010-2017)

Shoko’s ghost in The Creeps, The Lich, Possessed PB, that one bird Finn scene, and The Blank Eyes Girls in Adventure Time (2010-2018)

The Other Mother/The Beldam (Coraline) (2009)

The Cat Beast, Winged Beast, and Seamtress from 9 (2009)

Seamtress using 2 to hypnotize 1 (2009)

(this is from the mobile game but it’s still similar)j

Literally every single scene with the Red Bull and the Harpy (The Last Unicorn) (1982)

The “You’re not perfect” dude and the Mattress Demon (Courage the Cowardly Dog) (1999-2002)

This cat (The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack) (2008-2010)

The Bleeding taxidermy animal heads and the Lumberjack Ghost appears (Gravity Falls) (2012-2016)

The Great Owl (The Secret of NIMH) (1982)

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Am I dead no... Busy yes.

Too busy to draw fan art of an 80s film starring a cartoon unicorn who goes through an existential crisis... Also yes but it didn't stop me!

Click for a better quality cause for some reason you gotta do that sometimes

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Jeny’s interlock cast off exactly mirrors the long-tail (and the backward loop) cast on AND is a very good stretchy bind off.

This baby sweater is knit bottom up, but I made the sleeves top down, picking up stitches around the armhole, so to get the same edge on the ribbing, I did the long-tail cast on on the body and the interlock cast off on the sleeves.

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Lady Amalthea art I made! Hope you guys like it ♡

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I think Michael cera would make a good schmendrick, actually

At least based on Allan Arkin’s portrayal especially

If they remade The Last Unicorn and if they made it live action, what if Ben Schwartz played Schmendrick the Magician?

Based on his performance as Dewey Duck, I think he could really do it

[the-last-red-hot-swamis]

“(The unicorn) trotted up and down beside her pool, restless and unhappy. Unicorns are not meant to make choices. She said no, and yes, and no again, day and night, and for the first time she began to feel the minutes crawling over her like worms. ‘I will not go. Because men have seen no unicorns for a while does not mean they have all vanished. Even if it were true, I would not go. I live here.’”

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it's interesting to me that torture just works to us, as a literary device. It's everywhere in movies and stories and whatnot, from big-budget dramas to little grindhouse short stories. It fits neatly into the requirements of plot: character doesn't want to offer information, Gets Tortured, has to offer information.

the issue with this is that it isn't how it works.

torture is a display of power. It fouls interrogation, this is known; a person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, which is more often than not a lie, made up on the spot, or if the truth an incomplete and useless version of it. It isn't generally done for information's sake anyway, but as a form of what the ancient Greeks called hybris, the violent exhibition of your power over another person.

This is, every once in a great while, done right in fiction, but it's a challenge to write vs. the idea that it's a shortcut to one character revealing plot-critical information to another. Pretty much every form of torture works this way, even the ones that are legally permissible. Psychological torment or physical discomfort also produce an animalistic desire to escape harm and foul interrogation. The forms of torture the cops can do? The cops do it not to gain information (or if they think it will, they're lying to themselves) but because it makes them feel powerful.

There's probably a master's thesis in it for somebody studying the rise of torture as a plot device since the beginning of the war on terror and the contemporaneous development of the Broken Windows theory of policing. I'm not really aware of any similar level of disconnect between what Works in fiction and what happens in real life!

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I've long held that one of the interesting things about manic pixie dream girl stories is how after debuting with one authors tend to realize they can cut out the middleman of an everyman protagonist and write about weird women full time, but the Scott Pilgrim cartoon is WILDEST addition to my citations for this so far. They really Garfield Minus Garfielded that man. They hot dead wifed him. They produced the most expensive canon divergence minor character spotlight fanfiction in existence. They eeby deebied him. And it was incredible.

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Scott Pilgrim is, I think, the best example I can think of for establishing a setting's Nonsense Limit. The setting's Nonsense Limit isn't quite "How high-fantasy is this". It's mostly a question of presentation, to what degree does the audience feel that they know the rules the world operates by, such that they are primed to accept a random new element being introduced. A setting with a Nonsense Limit of 0 is, like, an everyday story. Something larger than life, but theoretically taking place in our world, like your standard spy thriller action movie has a limit of 1. Some sort of hidden world urban fantasy with wizards and stuff operating in secret has a nonsense limit around 3 or 4. A Superhero setting, presenting an alternate version of our world, is a 5 or 6. High fantasy comes in around a 7 or so, "Oh yeah, Wizards exist and they can do crazy stuff" is pretty commonly accepted. Scott Pilgrim comes in at a 10. If you read the Scott Pilgrim book, it starts off looking like a purely mundane slice of life. The first hint at the fantastical is Ramona appearing repeatedly in Scott's Dreams, and then later showing up in real life. When we finally get an explanation, it's this:

Apparently Subspace Highways are a thing? And they go through people's heads? And Ramona treats this like it's obscure, but not secret knowledge. Ramona doesn't think she's doing anything weird here. At this point, it's not clear if Scott is accepting Ramona's explanation or not, things kind of move on as mundane as ever until their Date, when Ramona takes Scott through subspace, and he doesn't act like his world was just blown open or anything, although I guess that could have been a metaphor. there's a couple other moments, but everything with Ramona could be a metaphor, or Scott not recognizing what's going on. Maybe Ramona is uniquely fantastical in this otherwise normal world. And then, this happens

Suddenly, a fantastical element (A shitty local indie band finishing their set with a song that knocks out most of the audience) is introduced unrelated to Ramona, and undeniably literal. We see the crowd knocked out by Crash and The Boys. but the story doesn't linger on the implications of that, the whole point of that sequence is to raise the Nonsense Level, such that you accept it when This happens

Matthew Patel comes flying down onto the stage, Scott, who until this point is presented as a terrible person and a loser, but otherwise is extremely ordinary, proceeds to flawlessly block and counter him before doing a 64-hit air juggle combo. Scott's friends treat this like Scott is showing off a mildly interesting party trick, like being really good at darts. The establish that Scott is the "Best Fighter in the Province", not only are street-fighter battles a thing, Scott is Very Good at it, but they're so unimportant that being the best fighter in the province doesn't make Scott NOT a loser. So when Matthew Patel shows off his magic powers and then explodes into a pile of coins, we've established "Oh, this is how silly the setting gets". It's not about establishing the RULES of the setting so much as it is about establishing a lack of rules. Scott's skill at street-fighter battles doesn't translate to any sort of social prestige. Ramona can access Subspace Highways and she uses it to do a basic delivery job. It doesn't make sense and it's clear that it's not supposed to. So later on, when Todd Ingram starts throwing around telekinesis, and the explanation we're given is "He's a Vegan" , you're already so primed by the mixture of weirdness and mundanity that rather than trying to incorporate this new knowledge into any sort of coherent setting ruleset, you just go "Ah, yeah, Vegans".