WELCOME TO STOAT SATURDAY

Hands-free telephone headset ad, 1993

Saw a Twitter post that compared Arcueid and Ciel to Vash and Wolfwood and I gotta tell you this would really be opening my third eye if I didn't already know about Alucard and Father Anderson

Arcueid is closer to being Vash (centuries-old blonde goofball, usually harmless and excitable, vendetta with sibling, can annihilate a city in the blink of an eye by accident) but Ciel is closer to being Anderson (Regenerator, blades, hunts heretics, secret weapon of the Church, Uses bible pages as binding weapons, 'I am the iron fist of the Lord' type shit)

This is Arcueid

And this is Ciel

This meme format brought to you by the comedy wildlife photography awards

Customer: (not on record) DMV: LOOKS A LITTLE LIKE LESBIAN Verdict: ACCEPTED

Lezbitron, home of the Sapphobots.

*watching episode for SDM*

Meghan: “…what just happened?!”

Me, casually, without hesitation: 

“Fred just lost his lower body, you see.“

Meghan: "…and his collar-thing.”

Me: “And his teeth. Perfectly ordinary, thank you very much.”

moral of madoka magica:

- sorrow is powerful

- hope is more powerful

- gay love is the most powerful

The nature of Tumblr not showing follower counts is that every mid-sized blog will have a small subsection of people absolutely convinced they're following/mutuals with a celebrity.

@celebbun this is me w u

Welcome to tumblr's own AITA!

Asks are open and anon is on. Please submit your own stories to be judged by the court of tumblr! Each story will come with a poll, judgements are as follows:

YTA=You're the asshole NTA=Not the asshole (the other party is) JAH=Justified asshole NAH=No assholes here (everyone is some level of justified) ESH=Everyone sucks here (you're all assholes) INFO=Not enough information to judge

ten years of fighting and when shit hits the fan tumblr instantly has reddit's back. the greatest enemies to lovers story ever told.

you understand

Oops, my hand slipped–

humanizations of websites have returned. nature is healing, capitalism is the virus

girl forced to leave her blanket. 560345 injured, 2708 murdered.

the important thing to know about the f/sn grail war is that it's occurring after hundreds of years of people who agreed to work together going "little do they know that I'm the one who's cheating for an Advantage!"

And specifically for F/SN almost all the people who knew it was rigged either died without bothering to tell their kids that, or are refusing to tell them because it’s funnier that way.

girl I would kill myself if I did that lol

reading harry potter actively makes you less literate

j why did you censor the name of the scottish play

I think doing that is way funnier than saying the Scottish play, and I’m not going to risk actually saying the name and having something bad happen

i just realized despite me making fun of you for saying m*cbeth, i refused to say it myself. i am fucked up

even I, the op, flinched while writing it in the notes 😔

do y’all only post from inside a theatre?

All the world's a stage, catgirlforeskin.

I mean, I could have made it narrower, but it seemed better to me to pick endpoints beyond where I expected the game to fall, yes?

Unless you're saying that Tiny Frog Wizards falls outside those points on the anthropomorphism scale?

What I mean to say is those are weird end-points for a scale of relative anthropomorphism because they make it difficult to pin down exactly what we mean by anthropomorphism.

The rabbits of Watership Down, for example, are almost entirely non-anthropomorphic in terms of their anatomy and use of technology, but they're considerably more politically sophisticated than a lot of media that's ostensibly much further up the scale of anthropomorphism; heck, they even have rabbit Fascism!

Redwall, conversely, is weirdly inconsistent; early books strongly imply that the mice of Redwall Abbey are roughly the size of real mice, while later books back away from that and adopt a more human-normative scale. Anatomic anthropomorphism, meanwhile, seems to vary not only between species, but also between members of the same species, based on how civilised or, ah, "savage" they are (and isn't that a can of worms).

Let's put it another way: if Watership Down and Redwall are the end-points of your scale, where does The Jungle Book fall? The Wind in the Willows? The Great Mouse Detective? Bambi?

Well.....it’s actually a completely reasonable scale, is the thing?

Like. Try this phrasing instead: “Where does this story fall, onn a scale from ‘To an outside human observer, these would be completely normal animals doing completely expected animal things (and not because they’re hiding/faking it)’ to ‘these animals wear clothes/armor, write/draw, use tiny human weapons, cook food that they eat at tables, and otherwise act like tiny humans’?”

And your examples kind of....make the point? Bambi would be just inside WD (there is a zero percent chance of any WD owl ever giving playful relationship advice to a rabbit), and Wind in the Willows/Great Mouse Detective would probably be about even? I’d argue GMD would be less so than WitW because due to the presence of human stuff in their setting, it’s much more relevant/restrictive to the characters that they are in fact mice, whereas there’s functionally no humans in Redwall to ground it.

Personally, I am VERY firmly of the opinion that anything further along the scale than Redwall is no longer an animal story. Like--I adore Disney’s Robin Hood as much as anyone, but that’s not an animal story? It’s Robin Hood with furries, which is extremely valid, but it’s not anthropomorphic fiction, it’s a normal story with anthro character designs. 

Again--that’s not, like, derogatory, or a criticism, it just is what it is.

I suppose you could argue that the back marker in the Watership Down direction should really be something like Black Beauty, where there’s no culture worldbuilding and the horses really don’t have any rich inner lives or mythology of their own; but I think that’s measuring “anthropomorphism” on a totally different axis than the one the asker was thinking of.

....Okay I might actually need to make a larger post about this because I saw this post and then spent the entire bus ride home thinking about sliding scales of anthropomorphism and I got, like, really into it but I’m genuinely just thinking out loud here and don’t want to come across as starting an argument on someone else’s post for fun.

HI I’M BACK AND I MADE GRAPHS

For me personally, I think there’s two primary axes here--the first is like I said above, a scale from “a real-life human observer, looking at these animals in a brief snapshot of their lives, would experience them as normal animals” to “these animals live their lives as tiny humans complete with clothing and period-typical technology”.

The OTHER axis is the degree to which the animals have a distinct culture independent from (though generally not untouched by!) humans. As in--do the animal characters, as in Watership Down, have their own mythologies, their own worldview, their own ways of living that would go on just fine without human influence? or, as in Black Beauty, do the animals primarily define themselves according to the roles humans give them?

(Note that the latter isn’t a mark of, like, bad writing--I literally used Black Beauty as the ur-example! If you’re writing from the perspective of a DOMESTICATED ANIMAL, having them mentally define themselves by their place in human society is the only thing that IS realistic! This is actually where the Warriors books lost me as a kid--it got to the point where even as a member of the target audience I was going, “but they’re domesticated cats? the fact that they have to live in and around humans is like, the Point, that’s what made this interesting--”)

So, for example:

You will notice this gets super weird if you go ANY further right than Redwall--Robin Hood: Men With Fursonas flipped to the other axis for no clear reason because if you go any further along the scale than Redwall, there ceases to be any relevance to the characters being animals at all*. It’s no longer an animal story. If they behave 100% like humans and there’s 0% human influence (ie, no humans in the setting at all), then they’re just...............people. The Y axis ceases to have any meaning.

*(Anthro characters having animalistic traits isn’t the same thing and I’m not dismissing the use of that trope! Their TRAITS are still relevant and can be part of a super compelling story--but it’s no longer an animal story, no longer anthropomorphic fiction, ie telling a story about animals with human traits. Frankly, NARNIA falls into this--Talking Beasts are full citizens 100% and Narnian culture belongs to all Narnians, so they don’t really fit into the concept being discussed.)

So Robin Hood flips the axis because on a technicality, you literally cannot have a Robin Hood adaptation that’s not dependent on human civilization, but normally, after you pass Redwall you break the quadrants and enter non-euclidean furryspace.

Then there’s that z-axis I added, which I’ve made a reference for--the Z axis is there to account for “talking animal” stories, where an animal might have totally natural-looking behavior but also be able to speak to one or all humans and confuse the placement somewhat.

I used 101 Dalmations as the anchorpoint, dead center--they can clearly understand every word their humans say and can even read, but aren’t capable of communicating back in any way other than dog behavior (tm). 

On one end of the scale is The Rescuers (all the animals are clearly ABLE to speak to humans at will but choose not to for their own protection). The other is again Watership Down, where human speech is comprehensible to the reader but the rabbit characters don’t understand it, and in which only a few of them are--just barely--capable of almost grasping the vague concept of writing or even of pictures/images being capable of conveying meaning.

For media like Redwall where humans just don’t exist or don’t functionally exist, they’d join 101 Dalmations dead-center because the question is irrelevant.

marcilleheads we are so fucking back