the sexy girlbots are returning. nature is healing
It's like when they reintroduced wolves to yellowstone
YOU CALL THIS HEALING?!? I'M UNDER FUCKING SIEGE
- deer and other prey animals when they reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone
literally
💎GEMSTONE STATUE
💚💙🐍 Mixed Serpentine (Ophite+Coil)
STATUE for Boiga ddT
💎GEMSTONE STATUE
💎Zn₂Fe²⁺(PO₄)₂·4H₂O+SiO₂+(Au+Pt)+Na₆Ca₂(AlSiO4)₆(SO4,S,Cl)₂+NaAl[Si₂O₆] 😋
💎GEMSTONE STATUE
🖤💛🌻 Black Agate
ahhh it feels so good to post regularly again
Hello, Back again with some art. This time, I'll be releasing #fanmade art from #Natlan.
Local Regional Specialty: Natlan Edition part 1 1) Chak Lool (Commonly found among shrubs in groups of 2 or three) A resilient flower whose shrubs grow amidst fertile, volcanic soil. The deep red crimson petals are said to evoke the very lava that runs beneath all of Natlan, thus making this flower a symbol of the land itself. 2) Mayahuel (Commonly found growing in open fields. Can harvest 3 leaves per plant) This fleshy leaf has spines lining its edge, evoking the image of a serrated blade. During times of droughts, the succulent juices provide the necessary nourishment to last until rainfall.
I still think that a key function of the way we think of the concepts "adult" and "child" is to separate the human population into "people who deserve autonomy but no protection" and "people who deserve protection but no autonomy" and in the process dehumanize both groups of people. We ignore the fact that all people need both autonomy and protection, and that our society could easily be set up to provide everyone a healthy mix of both.
And to be honest much of what we label as "protection" for children and "autonomy" for adults is merely the appearance of such. We act as if dictating what children are allowed to say, think, or feel is a form of care, and as if cutting away all social safety nets for adults is a form of empowerment.
how are you gonna steal $27k and spend it on a gacha game
im in this zine and we keep asking ree/kevumann if they really spent the money on genshin but they wont give us a real answer :| the venti icon is telling me that they did though
just want to add on how enraged i am on behalf of a mod who had to bear the physical brunt of taking stock out of ree’s hands when ree very well knew that there wouldn’t be enough funds to fulfill the rest of the orders. literally nobody involved - mods, contributors, buyers alike - deserve this
I love that Tumblr is actually a community. Your blog will be quite poor and boring if you only post your own stuff. Most of our blogs contain countless reblogs and discussions with other people on the website. This is communication and appreciation of each other’s creativity, thoughts, sketches and etc. It’s one thing to mindlessly like tons of photos a day like TikTok and Instagram offer you, and another to reblog and add hashtags and some comments about how the post made you feel or what you think you could add to a joke, a headcanon, an au, a story, an art… It makes this hellsite feel genuine.
the funny thing about the whole "no one wants to work" trend is that this is, hypothetically, how wages are supposed to go up naturally under capitalism. When wages are too low, workers refuse to work, so businesses raise their wages. The problem is that american companies are so used to paying people scraps and so far removed from the idea of workers having any kind of power or demanding some degree of dignity that they're just completely dumbfounded by this. When everyone refuses to work, their first instinct isn't "oh, our wages are too low" it's to post signs complaining about kids these days and begging people to pwease pwease come back to work I pwomise you won't get the cowonaviwus whiwe being yewwed at by a woman who compwains they made hew food wrong and demands a comped dessewt befowe leaving you a $2 tip
fictional character discourse would be more fun if we all internalized the fact that characters are narrative tools, not people. once we have that basic fact down, we can start talking about what story the author is trying to tell using these characters, whether they’re successful, whether the story itself is successful and by what means we are measuring success—which are all really fun and interesting things to discuss! but we simply cannot get to that point unless we first accept that fictional characters simply do not have thoughts, feelings, opinions, or any agency on their own. a fictional character has more in common with the fictional chair theyre sitting on than with a real person
Some one explain this to me like I’m five
I’ll try:
The way we talk about characters in stories would be better if we really understood that characters are just tools that writers use to tell a story.
Once we understand that, we can start talking about how the character is used to tell the story, about whether we think it’s an interested story, and about what makes something an interesting story to us.
Which are all really fun and interesting things to talk about.
But we can not do that unless we accept that characters are not people. They do not have thoughts. They do not have opinions. They do not make decisions. They only exist as tools to tell the story.
Other tools in a story are things like a chair in a story where people sit, or a palace in a fairy tale, or the sun in a story about a hot dessert. A character is like that chair, that palace and that sun: only a tool to tell the story.
A character is not like a real person. A real person can be ‘good’ or bad’ (or both) because they do good or bad things (or both), a character can only be a useful tool or a not useful tool to tell a story.
So when we hear something like “I like this character”, what we should hear is “I like this tool because it is an interesting tool to tell an interesting story”, we should not hear “I like this person and approve of their actions and would do similar actions”.
I’ll expand on that as people in the notes are going “well I like thinking of them as people” and while you’re reading the thing itself then yes, you’re supposed to! It’s called suspension of disbelief.
But when you critique the story you need to stop suspending that disbelief and look at the story through another lens, just like @queeranarchism says.
The same is true for writing. While the phenomenon of your characters basically “having their own life” in the writers head is pretty common, they are still only figments of your imagination. They are just as fictional as the chair they sit on and so are any of their actions. Your fantasy supervillains only do fictional crimes, hurt fictional characters and don’t necessarily reflect you in any direct sense. Their “actions” do not matter outside of the function they fill in the story.
YES!
And you can be critical of stories. They are reflective of the values of the author. But you can only see those values clearly when you look at the story as a story.
Example: J.K. Rowling really shows her fatphobia in the Harry Potter books by portraying a lot of unlikable characters as fat, and emphasizing their fatness at the exact moments when she wants you to dislike them. Aunt Marge is the obvious example. Aunt Marge ‘sausage fingers’ get described as she is abusing Harry in order to amplify the sense of disgust that you have for her. It’s clear that J.K. Rowling is using ‘fat’ as a stand in for ‘bad’. Fuck JKR.
That’s a valid critique of a story.
When you do not suspend disbelief, what you get is discourse between people who go “Harry Potter is a fatphobe because he is clearly judging Aunt Marge for her fat. Everyone who defends Harry Potter is wrong. Fuck you fatphobes!” and people who go “Harry Potter did nothing wrong! Aunt Marge is clearly an abuser. Anyone who brings up fatphobia here is protecting an abuser! Fuck you abuse apologists!”
Which doesn’t go anywhere and just ends up being a way to be angry to each other over things that are not real.
fictional character discourse would be more fun if we all internalized the fact that characters are narrative tools, not people. once we have that basic fact down, we can start talking about what story the author is trying to tell using these characters, whether they’re successful, whether the story itself is successful and by what means we are measuring success—which are all really fun and interesting things to discuss! but we simply cannot get to that point unless we first accept that fictional characters simply do not have thoughts, feelings, opinions, or any agency on their own. a fictional character has more in common with the fictional chair theyre sitting on than with a real person
Some one explain this to me like I’m five
I’ll try:
The way we talk about characters in stories would be better if we really understood that characters are just tools that writers use to tell a story.
Once we understand that, we can start talking about how the character is used to tell the story, about whether we think it’s an interested story, and about what makes something an interesting story to us.
Which are all really fun and interesting things to talk about.
But we can not do that unless we accept that characters are not people. They do not have thoughts. They do not have opinions. They do not make decisions. They only exist as tools to tell the story.
Other tools in a story are things like a chair in a story where people sit, or a palace in a fairy tale, or the sun in a story about a hot dessert. A character is like that chair, that palace and that sun: only a tool to tell the story.
A character is not like a real person. A real person can be ‘good’ or bad’ (or both) because they do good or bad things (or both), a character can only be a useful tool or a not useful tool to tell a story.
So when we hear something like “I like this character”, what we should hear is “I like this tool because it is an interesting tool to tell an interesting story”, we should not hear “I like this person and approve of their actions and would do similar actions”.
“The way you’re enjoying stories is wrong. You should do it this way instead” is what I’m seeing in this thread over and over. Many people - I think most people - are not interested in this type of analytical critique of the stories they love. And I must say y’all are making it sound like a thoroughly joyless experience.
Of course it’s important and useful and fun to look at stories as works of craft, recognizing that characters and other elements are tools to serve the narrative, and discuss from that perspective. And of course an author greatly benefits from taking that approach when writing or editing or both. There’s a lot of solid writing advice out there along these lines.
But that doesn’t mean the thousands and thousands of posts on this site talking about characters as though they’re real, in a thousand different ways from Watsonian analysis to roleplay, are somehow less valid. Or that an author who pieces together a story like clockwork is better than an author whose characters live in her head and express loud opinions on how the story should go.
Why not say “I really enjoy talking about stories this way, I wish there were more discourse like this, here’s some examples, anyone want to talk about X and the structure of Y”?
I think you’re kind of missing the point, which isn’t “you can not enjoy stories in this way”, but “you need to keep remembering that they’re stories”. There is a subsection of the kind of story lovers that you are describing that forget that and end up forming a morality around loving the ‘right’ characters in stories.
So you get things like “You can not like this villain because they did terrible things to the character that I care deeply about” and “everyone who is a fan of this character is an abuse apologist” and “the author of this story is immoral because they portrayed an immoral thing”.
And that leads real people to be very shitty to other real people, because they’ve gone too far pretending that characters are real people.
There is nothing wrong with loving deeply immoral characters simply because they’re interesting to the story. Again, they’re not real people. And immoral characters are so important! We actually need good, complex and engaging portrayals of immorality in order to reflect on the fact that we too are capable of immoral acts if we don’t recognize and grapple with those things within ourselves. They’re excellent tools for that.
So yeah, that’s the context for this.
you might also wanna read this part of this conversation: https://queeranarchism.tumblr.com/post/670075363262660608/fictional-character-discourse-would-be-more-fun-if
I procrastinate so much that I have a gaping hole of dread inside my chest where I think my other emotions are supposed to go. unless a potential employer is reading this, in which case I don’t do that & I have all the normal emotions that human beings have & I love capitalism
H-hewwo mister obama. When I was dwowning you refuwsed to hewp me!! you told me to pewish!!! Not anymore, Mr Obama. You’re the one who feews the surface of the water lapping at you.
Inside this woom is a key. It is buried under the concrete floor. You have a swedgehammer. Howevew, this woom is awso slowwly fiwwing with water!
Wiw you find the strength to save youwsewf, Mr Obama? Or wiw you, as you put it, “pewish”?
you guys need to get off the computer and do something about all the maidens trapped in crystals in the dark world