wildgeese98 - Tumblr blog

[wildgeese98]

YURI PROTOCOL STRIKES AGAIN

[wildgeese98]

Wow, thank you! I'll have to take some time and go through all of these, but on first glance a bunch of them seem promising.

Who's got book recs? Im trying to do some more reading this year. I generally enjoy sci-fi, horror, and fantasy, but I'm open to pretty much anything. I'm down for non-fiction too, especially history.

[wildgeese98]

doing some research on parapsychology as a field. in short, it's the study of how the supernatural relates to psychology, and is largely regarded as pseudoscience with only a handful of people studying it, and very very few universities will even offer a parapsych program.

so… martin, buddy, did you just google 'what degrees do people get for paranormal research' and go with the first one that popped up? you did didn't you. idiot.

[wildgeese98]

If you ever feel like you’ve made bad decisions just remember that somewhere out there is a theatre director at an all-white high school about to choose the spring musical

[wildgeese98]

Who's got book recs? Im trying to do some more reading this year. I generally enjoy sci-fi, horror, and fantasy, but I'm open to pretty much anything. I'm down for non-fiction too, especially history.

[wildgeese98]

Officially biting.

If we don't get some good, solid Colin Time next episode I'm gonna start biting.

[wildgeese98]

Mark A. Wickart, from Chicago Talent Sourcebook (1985)

scan

[wildgeese98]

REJECTION LETTERS FROM SOME INSTITUTE??

IT'S 1995

THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE HASN'T BURNED DOWN YET

NEWCASTLE-UNDER-LYME IS JUST SOUTH OF MANCHESTER

SNAKE MAN WAS REJECTED FROM THE MAGNUS INSTITUTE

[wildgeese98]

JESUS CHRIST

The most terrifying horror in this show is the desperately uncomfortable workplace conversations.

Alice, girl, for the love of god, you NEED to get a grip.

[wildgeese98]

some random TMA worldbuilding speculation about five years too late, but here it is anyway: I used to wonder what the practical purpose of Artifact Storage was supposed to be. like, I know the in-universe reason for its existence was that the Institute was "researching" the artifacts, but by the end we know the Institute wasn't researching shit; Elias (and presumably the people in charge of the sister organizations) knew exactly what was up with all that crap all along.

then I realized: it's Elias's home garden. hoard a bunch of extremely scary and dangerous artifacts with very specific containment requirements, then put a few stressed-out academics in charge of keeping it all in order so you can passively feed on their fear. people who desperately want to believe that learning and knowing the behaviors of every item will be enough to keep them safe. it's a less effort-intensive version of what Peter does on the Tundra.

[wildgeese98]

What’s your opinion on the contrast between “silly” and “serious” spaces? Do you think people can have very serious interpretations about a genuine piece of media and also be goofy about it? I’m asking this particularly because I’ve seen people in the Magnus podcast fandoms fight about people “misinterpreting” characters you, Alex, and the many other authors have written. Are you okay with the blorbofication or do you really wish the media you’ve written would be “taken seriously” 100% of the time?

And follow up question, what do you think about the whole “it’s up to the reader (or in some cases, listener) to make their own conclusions and interpretations and that does not make them wrong”, versus the “it was written this way because the author intended it this way, and we should respect that” argument?

This is a question I've given a lot of thought over the years, to the point where I don't know how much I can respond without it becoming a literal essay. But I'll try.

My main principle for this stuff boils roughly down to: "The only incorrect way to respond to art is to try and police the responses of others." Art is an intensely subjective, personal thing, and I think a lot of online spaces that engage with media are somewhat antithetical to what is, to me, a key part of it, which is sitting alone with your response to a story, a character, a scene or an image and allowing yourself to explore it's effect on you. To feel your feelings and think about them in relation to the text.

Now, this is not to say that jokes and goofiness about a piece of art aren't fucking great. I love to watch The Thing and drink in the vibes or arctic desolation and paranoia, or think about the picture it paints of masculinity as a sublimely lonely thing where the most terrible threat is that of an imposed, alien intimacy. And that actually makes me laugh even more the jokey shitpost "Do you think the guys in The Thing ever explored each other's bodies? Yeah but watch out". Silly and serious don't have to be in opposition, and I often find the best jokes about a piece of media come from those who have really engaged with it.

And in terms of interpreting characters? Interpreting and responding to fictional characters is one of the key functions of stories. They're not real people, there is no objective truth to who they are or what they do or why they do it. They are artificial constructs and the life they are given is given by you, the reader/listener/viewer, etc. Your interpetation of them can't be wrong, because your interpretation of them is all that there is, they have no existence outside of that.

And obviously your interpretation will be different to other people's, because your brain, your life, your associations - the building blocks from which the voices you hear on a podcast become realised people in your mind - are entirely your own. Thus you cannot say anyone else's is wrong. You can say "That's not how it came across to me" or "I have a very different reading of that character", but that's it. I suppose if someone is fundamentally missing something (like saying "x character would never use violence" when x character strangles a man to death in chapter 4) you could say "I think that's a significant misreading of the text", but that's only to be reserved for if you have the evidence to back it up and are feeling really savage.

I think this is one of the things that saddens me a bit about some aspects of fandom culture - it has a tendency to police or standardise responses or interpretations, turning them from personal experiences to be explored into public takes to be argued over. It also has the occasional moralistic strain, and if there's one thing I wish I could carve in stone on every fan space it's that Your Responses to a Piece of Art Carry No Intrinsic Moral Weight.

As for authorial intention, that's a simpler one: who gives a shit? Even the author doesn't know their own intentions half the time. There is intentionality there, of course, but often it's a chaotic and shifting mix of theme and story and character which rarely sticks in the mind in the exact form it had during writing. If you ask me what my intention was in a scene from five years ago, I'll give you an answer, but it will be my own current interpretation of a half-remembered thing, altered and warped by my own changing relationship to the work and five years of consideration and change within myself. Or I might not remember at all and just have a guess. And I'm a best case scenario because I'm still alive. Thinking about a writers possible or stated intentions is interesting and can often lead to some compelling discussion or examination, but to try and hold it up as any sort of "truth" is, to my mind, deeply misguided.

Authorial statements can provide interesting context to a work, or suggest possible readings, but they have no actual transformative effect on the text. If an author says of a book that they always imagined y character being black, despite it never being mentioned in the text, that's interesting - what happens if we read that character as black? How does it change our responses to the that character actions and position? How does it affect the wider themes and story? It doesn't, however, actually make y character black because in the text itself their race remains nonspecific. The author lost the ability to make that change the moment it was published. It's not solely theirs anymore.

So yeah, that was a fuckin essay. In conclusion, serious and silly are both good, but serious does not mean yelling at other people about "misinterpretations", it means sitting with your personal explorations of a piece of art. All interpretations are valid unless they've legitimately missed a major part of the text (and even then they're still valid interpretations of whatever incomplete or odd version of the text exists inside that person's brain). Authorial intent is interesting to think about but ultimately unknowable, untrustworthy and certainly not a source of truth. Phew.

Oh, and blorbofication is fine, though it does to my mind sometimes pair with a certain shallowness to one's exploration of the work in question.

[wildgeese98]

Drying him

[wildgeese98]

[wildgeese98]

[wildgeese98]

Mr Bonzo and Needles have the same categories in their episode codes because they are friends, thats all

[wildgeese98]

I need more people to tease the Archivist in a friendly manner