sculpte, lime, cisèle

sometimes people ask why I block out names when roasting an opinion and I think fewer people would ask that if they clicked through a few popular posts and saw that the people who got clowned on are still receiving anon hate years down the line

for every opinion I hold lightly enough to joke about, there is someone whose entire life revolves around holding a much more intense and aggressive version of it. every time a post gets reblogged, the odds of that person not seeing it get closer to zero

István Orosz — Four Mazes  (etching, 1989)

genuinely think that most bad takes on fiction online stem from the fact that people don't engage with fiction as a constructed art form and instead view it as somehow generated from the ether

a TONNNN of fandom people particularly begin and end their conversations with "[character] or [event] is problematic" or "[character]'s actions make no sense] or even "wow I love [character!!!]" without analyzing in the slightest what literary devices were employed and to what effect. this is kinda okay if you're just talking about a character you like, but it can still lead to pitfalls in your understanding of the overall story, and that's ESPECIALLY apparent with some "criticisms" i see of certain characters in stories.

bc guess what! characters are storytelling tools! they're fun, sure, and if you know me you know i LOVE to rotate some little guys in my brain. but characters, just like everything else, are elements of a broader story. and it can sometimes be a very reductive criticism to be like "[character] is a bad person" if you don't grasp that they were constructed by an author.

like okay, WHY are they a bad person? does the narrative condone their actions? are they presented uncritically as a good person? did the author intend for them to be seen as a bad person? are there biases, good or bad, in how the author presents this character, especially compared with other characters?

also: what role do they play in the broader narrative? do their actions have thematic weight? what about tone? is this work intended to be comedic or dramatic? does that make their actions have different weight due to that? why?

a story is not (usually) just a simple retelling of events that happened in an author's dream. characters and events are intentionally written. and sometimes they can pack quite a lot of unintentional baggage with them! but you have to start at base 1 of understanding that characters often exist in conversation with a work's themes before you can get to the real juicy criticisms

working out is great. it's the masturbation of getting beat up

[with conviction] my problem is that I'm not making any ordered lists

Katharine Hepburn, senior at Bryn Mawr, in costume as “Pandora” in a 1928 outdoor production of John Lyly’s comedy The Woman in the Moon. Hepburn would later write in her autobiography, “Pandora was a great part. She played in different moods under the influence of different planets. I was warlike under Mars. Loving under Venus, etc., etc. Funny, tearful, etc. My father said that all he could see in that performance were the soles of my dirty feet getting blacker and blacker. And my freckled face getting redder and redder.”

Mutuals I would become consul with

post-apoc ice age knight for the monthly design challenge in my discord!

Lancelot riding a cock

that's all

Rating: Not Cute

Although this Napoleon looks stoic, he is actually in severe danger! Napoleons are not good horse riders and should not be allowed to point dramatically, leaving only one hand on a rearing horse!