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[thedupshadove]

I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them

[thedupshadove]

[thedupshadove]

How to sexualize 1950s gender roles in a Femdom way.

[thedupshadove]

I know Disney turned the sympathy way up, but I remember them as also taking out any direct mention of Judaism--am I remembering wrong?

You can play a straightforward Shylock as sympathetic (though I wouldn't bother) and I would love to see an actual Jewish portrayal of that charming murderer Israel Rank. You can't do that with Fagin as written, because of the constant physical descriptions of him as monstrous and fanged and cackling. To humanize him, you have to create a totally new character, as the musical and Disney did- which I don't mind, that's a great character! If you just take out the Judaism, you get a horror movie monster in a realist work.

[thedupshadove]

Do you happen to know the origin of the fantasy trope in which a deity's power directly corresponds to the number of their believers / the strength of their believers' faith?

I only know it from places like Discworld and DnD that I'm fairly confident are referencing some earlier source, but outside of Tinkerbell in Peter Pan, I can't think of of any specific work it might've come from, 20th-c fantasy really not being my wheelhouse.

Thank you!

That's an interesting question. In terms of immediate sources, I suspect, but cannot prove, that the trope's early appearances in both Dungeons & Dragons and Discworld are most immediately influenced by the oeuvre of Harlan Ellison – his best-known work on the topic, the short story collection Deathbird Stories, was published in 1975, which places it very slightly into the post-D&D era, though most of the stories it contains were published individually earlier – but Ellison certainly isn't the trope's originator. L Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber also play with the idea in various forms, as does Roger Zelazny, though only Zelazny's earliest work is properly pre-D&D.

Hm. Off the top of my head, the earliest piece of fantasy fiction I can think of that makes substantial use of the trope in its recognisably modern form is A E van Vogt's The Book of Ptath; it was first serialised in 1943, though no collected edition was published until 1947. I'm confident that someone who's more versed in early 20th Century speculative fiction than I am could push it back even earlier, though. Maybe one of this blog's better-read followers will chime in!

(Non-experts are welcome to offer examples as well, of course, but please double-check the publication date and make sure the work you have in mind was actually published prior to 1974.)

[thedupshadove]

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[thedupshadove]

Dammit, people, if you’re going to write a Canadian character, you can’t just throw “eh” in wherever. It’s not a verbal tic - it has a very specific semantic role.

In brief, “eh” does one of two things:

Turn an imperative into a request. e.g., “Pass me that wrench, eh?”

Turn a statement into a question. e.g., “Cold out there, eh?”

In the latter case, there are several situations where it’s commonly used:

The speaker is not sure that the statement she’s just made is correct, and is asking the listener to confirm. e.g., “That’s about forty kilometers West of here, eh?”

The speaker is checking that the listener is still interested and wishes for her to continue, but does not expect any specific response. e.g., “So then this freakin’ moose shows up, eh?”

The speaker is being sarcastic. e.g., “You really thought that one through, eh?”

When used in this way, “eh” is roughly equivalent to appending “isn’t it?” (“doesn’t it?”, “didn’t you?”, etc.) to the end of a sentence; interestingly, it also functions very much like the Japanese “ne”, which has a nearly identical effect when appended to a statement.

Now you know.

[thedupshadove]

The Universal Monsters are the Disney Princesses of horror fans.

[thedupshadove]

[thedupshadove]

I don't know what paddington is doing on that list, but it made me think of the time someone drew a picture of the queen with paddington after she died, and we had scores of people losing their minds at the idea that paddington bear wasn't the same kind of communist as them

[thedupshadove]

See, the main dynamic of "Misery" is surprisingly un-horny for one of the main characters literally being a Romance novelist.

Kidnap fantasy bodice ripper, except the romantically-obsessed captor's affect is full Minnesota Nice.

[thedupshadove]

There are, of course, three angles from which we can approach this. There's the version where we milk the incongruity for as much comedy as possible. There's the horror option, where we consider how smiles and hospitality can mask selfish, sinister intentions. Or we can shoot for genuine eroticism, gambling that there's actually a lot of people who want to be locked in a chintzy yet well-appointed bedroom and called "cutie-pie."

Regardless, the story must take place in the absolute dead of winter. Not so easy for the protagonist to make a break for it when it's eighteen below and there's five feet of snow on the ground, after all.

Kidnap fantasy bodice ripper, except the romantically-obsessed captor's affect is full Minnesota Nice.

[thedupshadove]

Kidnap fantasy bodice ripper, except the romantically-obsessed captor's affect is full Minnesota Nice.

[thedupshadove]

i think two of the most telling things about a person are 01. what they think dorian gray’s “sins” were and 02. what they think king arthur’s fatal flaw was

[thedupshadove]

Consider Supernatural but it's the MASH Winchester siblings instead.