unpopularsoftshipper

[unpopularsoftshipper]

Spoilers: Eggers' Nosferatu

There's a lot of debate right now on if Count Orlok represents Ellen's shame/trauma/abuse, or if he represents her repressed erotic desires, and in turn there's debate on whether or not viewers who find the Ellen/Orlok dynamic alluring are "missing the point." Eggers and Lily-Rose Depp have both said in interviews that there's a mutual pull between Ellen and Orlok, and even that there's a love triangle element, but obviously the experience is terrifying for Ellen. How can we reconcile the sexual tension and the horror?

I think the broader theme is that Orlok represents everything in a woman's inner world that men refuse to acknowledge and accept - fear and shame and trauma, yes, but also our appetites . After the prologue, the story starts with Ellen begging Thomas to stay in bed with her; she says "the honeymoon was yet too short" and tries to pull him in and kiss him (obviously trying to start some nuptial bliss). But Thomas is anxious to meet with his boss and get his promotion, because he has a narrative he's going to fulfill: he's going to pay Friedrich back, buy a house, and then start having kids (he and Friedrich touch on this a bit later. Notably, Friedrich discloses Anna's pregnancy to Thomas before Anna has made it public.)

It's the start of Ellen and Thomas' married life and she just wants him to prioritize her sexual desire, but he chooses to focus on his ideal of success, which sets him on this path to confronting Orlok. We know Ellen doesn't care about having a house or fine things and she begs him not to go, but Thomas listens to Herr Knock and Friedrich, who tell him that as a husband he has to provide materially. He ignores Ellen's stated desires, and so fails to provide sexually and emotionally. When Thomas gaslights her about her nightmares and calls them childish fancies, he shuts down her vulnerability, which kills the intimacy she was enjoying in the literal honeymoon phase.

On a related note, there's a defence in here for Aaron Taylor Johnson's performance, which I've seen a few male critics call "over acting." In this story Friedrich represents the masculine ideal of the time, he's a rich business owner with a beautiful wife and kids. Thomas clearly looks up to him and wants to emulate him - he wants to give Ellen the life "she deserves." But Friedrich's elevated masculine status is why he refuses to listen to Ellen's "hysterical, sentimental" worries, he's too rational for all that of course. And his stubborn "rationality" leads to the death of his entire family. Friedrich IS the patriarchal ideal that crumbles when confronted with nuance and uncertainty. Some people see Friedrich and assume that a character like him is meant to come across as dignified, and that Aaron Taylor Johnson is messing up by making him look annoying, but really he is giving a great portrayal of a really common, annoying kind of guy. The kind of guy who melts down and has childish tantrums whenever they lose control of a situation, or their manly skills and values are shown to be irrelevant.

The men in the movie (excluding Professor von Franz) frame Ellen as childish for speaking about her dreams candidly, but their own childishness is revealed when her dreams manifest in the form of Orlok and become unavoidable. Ellen (partially? possessed in the moment by Orlok) tells Thomas how "foolish and like a child" he was in Orlok's castle. In the literal context that's cruel, and obviously that shit was scary as hell, but it hits on Thomas' failure in the metaphorical reading. He was a child playing house: 'I'll be the husband and make money, you be the wife and make babies.' When it came time to confront his wife's inner world and all the scary, traumatized, lustful complexity of it, he was completely inept. The message isn't that Orlok is what Ellen really needs, or that Thomas is a wimp, but he's not a perfect husband either. I think "the point" is that a real healthy marriage with sexual, emotional, and spiritual mutuality is impossible in that society with Thomas/Friedrich's ideals. In that kind of society, a spiritually and sexually potent woman like Ellen ("in heathen times you might have been a Priestess of Isis") will always be caught in a "love triangle" with her husband and her own inner world.

[unpopularsoftshipper]

TO BE LOVED ENTIRELY 🩸

[unpopularsoftshipper]

A PLAGUE UPON THE LAND<333

[unpopularsoftshipper]

You are my affliction.

[unpopularsoftshipper]

the moment between lightning and thunder

happy belated birthday to my stupid babel sons robin and ramy :’)

[unpopularsoftshipper]

in shock hearing people say that babel only takes a turn and becomes heart-wrenching at the end because that experience is so incomprehensible to my chinese diaspora ass that felt like their heart was being torn from their chest in the very first chapter likeeeee babel is underscored by such immense amounts of tragedy and loss and horror around colonialism and imperialism from the very beginning it's so crazy that white people can just read the first half of babel and not feel like every bone in their body was being dissolved in acid by the centuries of unspoken grief written in robin's experience SORRYYYYYYYY. average poc reading babel vs average white person reading babel truly LMFAOOOO

[unpopularsoftshipper]

my brother's keeper (poem from here)

[unpopularsoftshipper]

hi i love your artwork so much; your style is absolutely adorable!! if you're still taking requests i would love to see margaery and/or loras in your style, but if not that's fine!!

TYRELL KIDS HELL YEAH!!!!!

TYSM!! I hope you'll like this >:D

[unpopularsoftshipper]

.🔥.

[unpopularsoftshipper]

weird doomed yuri thing

[unpopularsoftshipper]

Sansaery?

sansaery indeed 🙏

[unpopularsoftshipper]

For anyone who hasn't seen them before, Hidden Search Operators are handy tricks you can use when you're either searching or filtering AO3.

summary: string is a generic way of explaining that you can search AO3 for a specific word that appears in a summary. You can do this from the search bar in the header, from the Any Field box at the top of the Advanced Search form, or from the Search Within Results box at the bottom of the filter menu.

Examples:

summary: Bruce

summary: "Bruce Banner"

summary: Bruce OR summary: Banner OR summary: Hulk

You need to put quotation marks around your search term if it is more than one word. The quotes make sure that the site searches for those two words together.

The other two operators listed work best in the Search Within Results box.

expected_number_of_chapters: 1 will return results where every fic has only 1 chapter currently posted.

You can use expected_number_of_chapters: -1 if you want results where every fic has more than 1 chapter currently posted.

otp:true will return results where there is only 1 relationship tag on the fic. If you want results where there are 2+ relationship tags (and no fics with only 1 relationship tag) then you can use otp:false

[unpopularsoftshipper]

born to write the beginning and ending, forced to write the middle part.

[unpopularsoftshipper]

[unpopularsoftshipper]

▶︎ My interpretation of the Cike from “The Poppy War” (twitter / instagram)

I took some creative liberties with the hair, I’m sorry for the inaccuracies! I love that Altan’s hair is described as “wet ink” …anyway, I miss them :’) I first posted this on twitter and instagram, but here it is for posterity! If you’re interested in prints/stickers, I have a shop ♥

✖︎ do NOT repost

[unpopularsoftshipper]

Altan Trengsin from The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang.. and the compulsory long-haired look

I just finished the first book and it is so good!

[unpopularsoftshipper]

rf kuang really needs to pay for my therapy bills. i read tpw a year back and i still haven't recovered from 'fire and water looked so lovely together. it was a pity they destroyed each other by nature' and 'ruin me, ruin us and i'll let you' and 'together? together?' andand 'it doesn’t matter that he loves her. it doesn’t matter. it’s never mattered'

''She’s the only divine thing he’s ever believed in. The only creature in this vast, cruel land who could kill him. And sometimes, in his loveliest dreams, he imagines she does''

like what the fuck rfk????????????????????????????????????/