“the end goal of fiction is (of course) to collectively identify and consume only the good things. good stories make you a good person and bad stories make you a bad person” you guys literally sound like the 2nd grade teacher who told my mom not to let me read the golden compass
not to swing the bat 360°, but i’ve seen a lot of weird, condescending nonsense on the other side of this as well
look, the end goal of strong literacy skills isn’t to have perfect taste and be right all the time. i frequently enjoy things that have objective flaws. i frequently fail to enjoy things that most people would consider flawless. sometimes, i fall for propaganda. sometimes, something makes me uncomfortable, or confused, and i have to pause to figure out why. that’s life!
the more comfortable you are navigating the relationship between what a story wants to say, what it is saying, and how that affects you, the easier your life will be. you are free to criticize the things you love and celebrate the existence of the things you hate.
i say this with all the compassion of a person who went through years of therapy for OCD—your gut reactions do not define you, and you don’t have to worry about The Bad Media turning you evil
kills me that “every single classic out there is written by white people” is such a common take. are the literary traditions of other countries a fucking joke to you? come on. go read the journey to the west or something I beg
seriously though please go read journey to the west, it’s incredibly culturally significant and a lot of fun, and it’s episodic in structure, so I’ve been comfortably taking it at my own pace. also sun wukong is there. you want to meet the hyper murder monkey. believe me.
GIRLBOSS TOURNEY SEMIFINALS: TWO MANIPULATORS OF VARYING INFLUENCE
Select which one you think is GIRLBOSSIER, i.e., which one is the better girlboss
Propaganda
Akane Kurashiki:
She was burned to death as a child ut that didn’t stop her from getting her revenge using just a single 9-hour long death game (and also traumatizing multiple people including her childhood crush)
Baru Cormorant:
Decided to join the side of the colonisers to colonise a new place (being the imperial accountant) and she is going to rise up through the ranks of the government to take them down. She crashes multiple economies. She says that “a fling could be tactically justified”. She gets high on fantasy cocaine and is like, is should do this more often. She gets lobotomised. She has like four girlfriends.
so many social justicey arguments really do seem like they were invented in a lab to be a saw trap for people with obsessive compulsive tendencies
one of the examples i was thinking of is the idea you are Morally Obligated to tag any potential triggers, despite that being a category that theoretically includes literally everything. maybe the implication/way most people interpret it is “if you have a decent following, its best practice to tag common ones plus requests from followers” but i dont think it should be difficult to understand why trying to figure out which ones people will get mad at you about is a saw trap. esp on platforms more like twitter where providing content warnings in the first place is a logistical nightmare
Op’s tags:
I was just talking tonight about how Tumblr is unsafe for my scrupulosity and here’s one reason why.
[text id: What is it like to disregard the body? How do we get around ourselves when we are always in the way? I wonder how badly the serpent wants the loop to end, to consume himself until the flesh is gone. Is that possible? What would that look like, that nothing-space? To complete the autocannibalism of revisiting one’s own trauma, for it to be over? end id]
