“You know that books are safety and escape and wisdom and peace and the things that get you through. Whether they are showing you the best way to prepare mushroom soup, or breaking your heart with someone else’s loss so you can better bear your own, or making you laugh when there is nothing funny in your life, or making you afraid so that real life seems less fearful. You understand.”
― Found in a Bookshop by Stephanie Butland
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God I love doing unhinged literary analysis of stuff. Like why are people so annoyed at it and keep saying "the curtains are just blue", like dude, making up insane shit about why the curtains are blue is the most fun shit ever
Like sure whatever I could read a story and be like "well that was neat" and call it a day, but it's so much more fun to obsessively analyze every last detail in a story
How else am I supposed to send my friends the most absolutely bat shit messages like "is this cute anime girl a metaphor for the atom bomb?"
You folks are missing out on the good shit
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Bibliomania is like one of those stories you read as a child you were just way too young for and it was just way too scary but can't help but feel incredibly fascinated by it and so in being that it rewired your brain and made you realize what a lenghts a story can truly go to
read bibliomania
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I cannot overstate how weird the background surrounding the BIBILIOMANIA manga is.
- There's no info on the creators at all and this is their only work
- They won an award for it
- The art and story are credited to separate people, which is unusual in manga
- This, combined with the fact the manga reads left to right and features double-length chapters makes some people think the creator names might be pseudonyms
- But that just raises the questions of "who" and "why"
- Actual physical copies are near-impossible to find and may not exist legitimately at all
Either way it's insane that the creators just made one of the most breathtaking horror manga ever, released it online and then dipped
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The following post is in regards to the manga "Bibliomania". It contains very blatant spoilers which may ruin the manga for you. The manga is available to read freely on the internet, and it is very short. I personally would recommend reading this manga, and I would also recommend not reading this post without having experienced the manga first. Thank you!
I've been thinking about Alice for quite some time, and, regardless of her clear disregard for human lives, found it hard to not find her goal as... noble.
She craves knowledge. She strives for the truth.
She learns, records, archives, assimilates, compiles. Nothing and no one is left behind in her wake. The world itself reduced to information, forever immortalized inside her pages.
So much so that she's willing to raze the world, take in all the bombs and fire and projectiles humanity has, and keep going.
I found it admirable: How merciful, willing to record all of humanity's information, all of our cultures, all of our collective and individual knowledge. Every little detail and thought and feeling and memory of each one of us, no matter how lost or meek. All of our joys and grief, all of our dreams and despairs. No one left behind...
Then, I reached the end of the story. Our main character reflects that, all this archiving has left no one alive on the face of the planet. As I read, then, a thought crossed my mind. "Wait, that means... there will be no more information. Without people... there will be no more music, or films, or books, or memories, or culture..." then, another thought followed: "Besides, all of this recording, all of this information... and no one to share it with?" The purpose of recording information is, precisely, to make it easily accessible, and to preserve it, of course. But with no one left to access it, there's no point in recording...
And that's when I got it. Alice is selfish. Yes, you can see her obsessiveness with preserving information as pure, admirable. But she's no goddess of creation.
She does not care about the knowledge to be yet created, to be yet discovered. She never cared, because it was never about that.
Even as a sick kid, when Alice saw the butterfly at the window, she reached with her hand to grab it, to observe it, but she had no intention of letting this butterfly go, or live freely, or lay eggs so it could continue the existence of its species. All she wanted was to see the butterfly upclose and to know it had existed, that's all.
And thats precisely how she acts in the present of the story.
She reaches with her hands (quite literally) to grab the people. To analyze them and register them. She does not care about the people's feelings, or the future of the world. She does not even care about the knowledge yet to be born.
Because it was never really about that. She wanted to obtain all the possible knowledge there was, and that's exactly what she did.
She recorded.
Whether you wanted to or not.
Whether you deserved it or not.
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