mortphilippa

[mortphilippa]

day 16 - 'alalā

[original post is misspelled!!!]

[mortphilippa]

DELETE THIS POST

[mortphilippa]

it is what it is folks

hit me

[mortphilippa]

We have enough micro-rpgs. Write more games with the sweeping - albeit probably delusional - ambition that they will be played in epic 3 year campaigns, wrapped up in big coffee table sized tomes. If I can’t use your book to subdue wild animals or serve as ballast for a hot air balloon I’m not interested.

[mortphilippa]

so, i live on  the fourth floor of an apartment building that faces a fairly busy street; it’s on a hill so car noises are pretty regular over the course of the day. because i’m high above the street, you obviously can’t see the cars unless you look out the window, right? but sometimes the sun reflects off the car roofs or whatever, and so there’ll be a light on my ceiling as a car passes by.

so my cat? whenever he hears a loud engine, day or night, he looks at my ceiling. even if there is no refraction going on. to him, those are the sounds of light on the ceiling. sometimes the light appears and there is a loud noise. it’s 8pm and a truck just passed and he watched the ceiling as the car moved past my windows – no reflection this time of night, but trucks are ceiling creatures and i just think that’s such a like – it’s a good correlation, buddy!! you figured it out!! you’re wrong but you’re so smart!!

[mortphilippa]

Its odd being an atheist with a deep appreciation for theology. It seems to weird people out sometimes. I get religious people who assume I'm some kinda "All religions are dumb and stupid" type, and atheists who assume I belong to whatever religion I'm talking about at the moment.

I genuinely do just like this stuff.

#same #i just like medieval religion #its super interesting

[mortphilippa]

[mortphilippa]

An ink-soaked dream, an echoing call. Your secret won't stay down.

[mortphilippa]

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

[mortphilippa]

me, waking up in a cold sweat: selkie and swan maiden girlfriends

[mortphilippa]

[mortphilippa]

Inktober day 23: Celestial

There's a bad moon on the rise

[mortphilippa]

[mortphilippa]

We have enough micro-rpgs. Write more games with the sweeping - albeit probably delusional - ambition that they will be played in epic 3 year campaigns, wrapped up in big coffee table sized tomes. If I can’t use your book to subdue wild animals or serve as ballast for a hot air balloon I’m not interested.

[mortphilippa]

Cloud Empress Ready to Rock!

Featuring Fungi of the Far Realms from Melsonian Arts Council

A big chonky panic die

UVG dice from WizardThiefFighter

And my own cryptic notes!

(seriously, you gotta mix Fungi with Cloud Empress)

[mortphilippa]

[mortphilippa]

I didn’t take many photos this weekend, but you can enjoy this one that made me laugh.