Latest Posts by self-inconsistent - Page 2

The veil is thick here..... I sense fuck all

i was trying to make a meme but i fucked up the audio layering and

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

if you want to find love stop using dating apps and go and get brainwashed or possessed so someone has to fight you and tearfully beg you to recognize them and fight against the control you're under because they know this isn't the real you or something

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

We could have lived in this world... damn you Rutherford

Ur secret is safe with me cause ima forget

narrator who's terrible at social cues & describes every facial expression as "unreadable"

天使のたまご (Angel’s Egg | Amano Yoshitaka/Oshii Mamoru  | 1985)

少女革命ウテナ (Revolutionary Girl Utena | Ikuhara Kunihiko  | 1997)

灰羽連盟 (Haibane Renmei | Tokoro Tomokazu | 2002)

do you all see my vision here

can we all agree that it's pathetic when so-called "friends" try to sabotage your opportunities? you're clearly jealous that the amulet of eternal darkness chose me and no amount of "please fight it, i know you're still in there somewhere" is going to change that. crab bucket mentality. grow up.

died and came back tired. died and came back exhausted. died and came back with manic energy. died and came back with malingering unease. died and came back twitchy. so many possibilities

Post of Theseus where I write something and make 94 edits

Furthermore whoever removed the audio jack from phones should be grilled in front of congress. The fact that I need a dongle to listen to music on a modern telephone while 20 years ago I could have simply plugged a universally standardized cord into the audio jack everyone knew how to use is an anti-human move that should be punished.

something something i was never who you wanted me to be

I AM ALMOST COMPLETELY SOULLESS!!!!!!

I AM INCAPABLE OF BEING HUMAN!!!!!!!!

I AM INCAPBALE OF BEING INHUMAN!!!!!!!!!!

I AM LIVING. UNCONTROLLABLY!!!!!!!!!!!

i'm so sorry, i walked marginally more than a mile in your shoes. my understanding of you has subsumed my own consciousness, i am you to a greater extent than you ever were, and you are merely a simulacrum to the true you, which is me.

i love when a villain is like "ahhh what a ROTTEN day" but they mean that it's good and they're just saying it like that because they arbitrarily like when things are bad

i love when a character has something terrible happen to them and as a result they see themself as, essentially if not literally, a ghost. and so that means they only can (and have to) do what ghosts do, ie get revenge and then cease to exist. easy as that. but then halfway through this ghost vengeance they realize hey actually i might still be a human person. with human needs. that’s incredibly inconvenient, considering how much i’ve invested in this whole ghost thing

a very unsettling plate found in Cracow, Poland

he’s an unreliable narrator TO YOU. i believe him

Dude you gotta meet my friend I love him and his company makes me happy

So if every time they stopped to swap out a board on the ship of theseus, theseus went ahead and ate the old one, 1) did he Eat A Ship by consuming it's constituent parts and 2) if so, is the ship he ate more or less of the same ship they set sail with than the ship they finished sailing with? If you had ship of theseus crust pants that were created via your friend taking a big bite out of your pants occasionally and then you had to patch it until the original fabric was all gone, are your pants you wear and the pair of pants your friend ate the Same Pants ?

that didn't happen you're making that up

A tranquil and soft sunset - submitted by @cypriathus

#75DBCD #C9DBBA #DCDBA8 #F5CDA7 #FAA381

im sorry i said that i wanted to replace your tendons and muscles with thin spectral cords of myself so i could draw you up and pull you around like my puppet. in retrospect that was kind of a weird thing to say and most people don’t wanna get possessed or whatever. could i instead coil myself around you like snakes and move you how i want with more brute force? is that more normal

everything is a transgender allegory except being transgender which is about being alive

happy "everyone forgets that icarus also flew" monday. i want to throw up !