tricksypixie

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let's stare lovingly at mama

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yuri and yaoi are some of the best, most sacred things in the entire world

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How did I forget that timmy chalamet is in interstellar…

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december: finish nona january-april: very intentionally Not think about it lest I break irreparably forever now: being soooo brave about it

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go loud

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my climbable mama

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holding hands with mama

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Albino CAPY!!!

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HAPPY PRIDE

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There was some discussion on the discord about how most "superhero fiction" gets tainted by the fact that there are such established things as "superheroes" and "supervillains" in these settings, and that this then taints everything about these pieces of fiction because wide swathes of psychology and character immediately get swept to the side. There's a flattening effect to that, I think I would agree with that, and anyway, it's well-mined territory.

So instead, you could write a superhero novel (or comic) where the entire concept of "superhero" doesn't actually exist, in the same way that zombie movies don't recognize the concept of zombie.

And I think that this would be interesting, but would also immediately introduce a few constraints of its own:

The timescale is relatively short. There's very few imitators, and not enough coverage/traction that people have started to say "hey, these guys are all kind of like each other".

The scope is relatively narrow, probably not more than ... ten characters? And they can't overlap with each other all that much. Maybe you can have small clusters that expand the cast, I guess, a recognized subset of the unrecognized superhero.

This works best in a novel, not in a webfic, because webfic loves to sprawl (and this is one of the best things about webfic).

So to game it out a bit, you have all these different characters, and none of them thinks of themselves as a "superhero". We're pretending the whole concept doesn't exist in this universe. We're making no sweeping generalizations about superheroes, because they're just not a thing here.

Instead, we draw from as many different genres and ideas as possible.

People aren't wearing costumes, there's one guy who's wearing a costume, dressing up like a mascot. Someone else is wearing a uniform. Another guy is wearing a disguise, totally different thing meant to protect his identity, nothing more. There's a guy who summons armor around himself, a guy that transforms, they have distinct individual powers that come from different places, there's nothing that unites them except that they come into conflict with each other. There's no ethos of superheroism or supervillainy.

Part of the idea is that you cannot sort these people into typologies, each of them is individual, except maybe there's a brother-sister couple in there, or a group of five super sentai types or whatever, because we also don't want to make a rule that each and every person is a unique individual.

I think there's a lot that you could get from this. Normal superhero fiction tends to have a lot of ideology in it, and here, because these people don't recognize each other as being the same thing, you have more room to move around. No one is doing things because it's expected of them, except the people who are, who are fighting crime because this is part of their family legacy, or the guy who's a space cop and this is just literally his job. There's greater room for intersectional discussion if you drop "superhero" from the vocabulary.

And it's much closer to what superheroes used to be, before the genre calcified and congealed, when everyone was just their own weird person with their own weird agenda. There is something fresh about that, I think, something that I haven't seen very often, a way of writing superheroes that tries to be in the genre by being outside of it.

I'm not sure I have any ambition to actually write something like this, but I do think that it's probably worth doing. (And I also imagine that if I had infinite depth of knowledge on superhero fiction I would be able to point to three specific pieces of media that did this exact thing.)

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Mother and child training longsword in Chile, at the Centro Esgrima Histórica

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lets go to sleep with mama

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Consensus on tumblr seems to be that Trump's actions on Iran are the fault of the Dems because they allowed him to run as a peace candidate/failed to run someone more electable.

well, there's no pleasing some people. murc's law, innit? somehow only the democrats have agency, only the democrats can be held to standards, the republicans are a force of nature that cannot be reasoned with or expected to govern responsibly, etc, etc.

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let’s go everywhere with mama