#tb essay

[ohnoitstbskyen]

The overwhelming misery of going viral on YouTube

In April of 2021, I posted a short to YouTube - a 60 second video in the format of their TikTok competitor. In the nature of shorts, it was a one-minute, necessarily un-nuanced hot take about a subject I like to talk about: character design. Specifically I made the mistake of lamenting that the character design of female heroes in major games tend to prioritize attractiveness rather than using their body shape to do storytelling about their lives or capabilities.

It did okay, garnering about 38k views in its first month. Didn't set the world on fire, but I got my point out there, and while there were some crappy comments, for the most part people seemed to understand what I was driving at.

The short had eventually climbed to about 100.000 views after a full year of being online, which is respectable, but in the world of YouTube Shorts a fairly middle-of-the-road level of success (these are extremely short videos being served extremely quickly to a huge base of users). Fast forward to November 8th of this year, and... something happens. More than a year after it was originally published, it starts gaining traction.

Slowly at first, a few thousand views, but by the 14th it's gained 80.000 views in a day. On the 16th, 400.000, on the 17th, 680.000. I have no idea why this is happening, there's no influx of viewers from any outside source, there's no topical news event that would make the video suddenly relevant.

I tweet about it, bemused by the sudden jump, but also hinting a bit at the other side of this story.

"There Is No Such Thing As Negative Press"

On YouTube, there is on the systemic level very little difference between positive attention and negative attention. If you create excellent work that brings joy into people's lives, they engage with your video and the algorithm reads that as success. And if you create miserable, hateful content that makes people angry and stokes them to responses of outrage, disgust or jeering, the algorithm reads that as a kind of success, too.

Hate-bait and rage-bait YouTubers operate in that latter space, churning out inflammatory or distressing content, hoping to elicit either reactions of horror, or gleeful cheering from people who like it when their favourite online personality trolls the Other.

But there's another way to garner negative attention, and that is to create content which is not at all designed to bait or elicit a negative response, but whose subject matter nonetheless produces a negative response from a certain kind of person.

That is the unfortunate slip-and-slide I have found myself on.

At the time of writing, the short sits at 6.8 million views, has been gaining on average 2 million views per day, and it still seems to be accelerating. Despite those skyrocketing numbers, however, it only ("only") has around 1300 published comments underneath it.

That is because, after the first couple of million views, I told YouTube to automatically hold all comments for review. That is, YouTube allows users to comment on the video, but those comments are not published until I manually approve them.

The reason I did this is... well, it's easier to show you with some pictures. Content warning, these are unfiltered YouTube comments, so expect casual bigotries.

These are screenshots from the "held for review" tab of my YouTube Studio backend. YouTube in recent years has gotten good at filtering out content like overt racial slurs and the worst of the worst insults, which is nice, but the filtered comments tab is still not a particularly pleasant place to read through right now.

Most of the comments are like what you see above: casually rude, fatphobic, homophobic, transphobic or otherwise unpleasant. Some of the comments are more intense, threatening me with violence, insulting me personally, "I hope your mom gets raped by a [racial slur]," and worse. The worst comments are a small percentage, but as you can imagine, they do stand out in the mind, and a small percentage of a huge number can still be a lot of comments.

And that's the thing. There are hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds of comments. I scrolled for fifteen minutes and did not see the end of it. YouTube doesn't keep a visible count on how many comments are held for review, but I'd not be surprised if the 1300 comments count would have been doubled if I hadn't stopped it when I did. And since the video is still accelerating, that number is likely to skyrocket as well.

This provides me with the best theory I have as to why the video took off: the YouTube algorithm started showing it not to people who it thought would like it, but to people it thought would dislike it enough to react, to comment. And the more people did comment, the more the algorithm showed it to other people just like those who commented, who were also likely to dislike it.

This causes a feedback loop of negative attention, which the YouTube algorithm (horrifyingly) interprets as a success and an incentive to keep pushing the video.

Moderating this comments section is now physically impossible - I would need a staff of a dozen to handle it, which I can't afford and who I wouldn't want to expose to it, and while this deluge is going on, moderating the comments of other videos becomes next to impossible as well, since the "held for review" tab is utterly monopolized.

One fix for this problem, of course, is to simply disable the comments. But in my experience, doing that only encourages the worst of the commenters to seek out your other content and leave even worse comments there instead. In fact, a couple of dozen particularly irate people have already sought out my other channels to post insults there, adding to the stress and workload of dealing with all this viral "success."

How YouTube Makes YouTubers Worse

This situation is stressful, because humans are monkey creatures with monkey brains that do not like being exposed to a constant stream of rudeness, cruelty and casual bigotry. However rational you try to be about it, however detached and cold, it wears on you. It chips away at your mental defenses and becomes a constant source of low-level stress and misery.

But as far as YouTube is concerned, it's a huge success.

YouTube's systems are all set up this way. They celebrate increases in numbers with cheerful messages and positive green arrows and "helpful" statistics showing just how much things are growing - meanwhile, if you post otherwise positively received work that doesn't attract as much attention, it will give you dour "your content received fewer views due to lower interest this month" messages and greyed-out downward arrows. If you have a video that does really well on the numbers, YouTube will even play a little fireworks animation on its statistics to celebrate.

It's a form of not-so-subtle psychological manipulation. As a YouTuber you are dependent on your statistics to inform your work - if your rent depends on making those numbers go up, you essentially have no choice but to pay attention to them and let them guide your decision making. And so YouTube designs its systems to push its creators towards the behaviour that the platform finds most beneficial: numbers optimizing.

And the thing is, if I went only by the numbers, I would look at the success of this short and go "oh, there's a viable content strategy here!"

I could try and replicate its "success" by creating more content around the same topic, by targeting the same kind of outrage-baiting, by identifying the contentious subjects and trigger points brought up by the angry people in the comments and hitting them repeatedly, hoping to make engagement fall out.

YouTube would reward me for that, quite handsomely, in fact, even as mental health and professional happiness would absolutely crater. I don't have the personality for that kind of content creation, it's not what I want to do with my work, it's not the kind of person I want to be.

But I am not immune to propaganda. I have already changed as a person from doing this job, I know this for a fact. My priorities have shifted, my wants and needs have changed. Not for the worse, I believe, not yet, but the platform is constantly, constantly pushing on me.

It's unpleasant and it's stressful. It's hostile design, coupled with primitive and insufficient moderation tools, coupled with an aggressive algorithm which will go out of its way to ensure your relationship with your audience is toxic, if that toxicity produces better numbers for the platform.

Viral success is often thought of as a desirable thing, something which can launch a career or skyrocket an unknown to success. The reality is, it is mostly just overwhelming. I'm a grown man and I have done online content creation for a long time, and I have learned strategies to manage toxic comments sections over years of experience.

But imagine if something like this happened to a sixteen year old. Imagine if it happened to a teenage girl just starting out making videos. Or a trans person. Or, hell, any person from a marginalized community. I am sheltered by my privileges, but I have seen how dark it gets and how fast it gets dark for people who don't have those extra protections.

Well, it does happen to them, and no matter how rancid, bigoted and horrible the abuse they receive, they will log in to YouTube Studio to see happy fireworks and "Nice! Your video got 20 million views!" with a little green upwards pointing arrow right next to it.

You might have seen articles and thinkpieces around "creator burnout," and I want you to know that a huge part of what burns creators out is the primitive, profit-optimizing, hostile systems that power these platforms and monetize our worst experiences on them as "engagement."

In case you're wondering how much money I've earned from those 6.8 million views, by the way, it's about $20.

YouTube says they're rolling out full Shorts monetization next year, so I guess I just picked the wrong month to go viral.

---

If this story resonated with you at all, do me a favor and leave a nice comment under the work of an online creator you enjoy. It helps more than you might think.

You can tip me on Patreon or Ko-fi if you want to.

#tb essay #youtube #hostile design #burnout

[cassidyawesome]

@ohnoitstbskyen’s “Nine Essays About Characters That Matter” video literally struck me through the heart with a dagger. The way it’s presented as stories told by people of their blorbos with mister the big skyen commenting in between is perfect. So perfect i’ve been inspired to write a small essay about my Characters That Matter, if this is just rambling into the wind or not, i just want to express my thought in this form.

It’s Yang, it’s Yang, of course it’s Yang how could it not be Yang Xiao Long. Yang as a character - and rwby as a whole literally flashbanged my entire humanity in june of 2022.

Lots of people love Yang, how couldn’t you. Maybe you relate with her backstory in relation to Ruby, how she was forced to grow up and play parent for Ruby because both their mom’s fumbled the bag. Maybe you’re someone who’s lost a limb or otherwise disabled and find triumph in how she fights on despite her disability. For me, it’s neither - what gets me going about her is her personality, particularly in early volumes. She’s this larger than life, fun loving person who’s the embodiment of warm fire who brings you in and is your friend. Which is exactly the kind of standard i try to live up to. Another aspect of this side of her i love is the protector aspect she inhabits, she was Ruby’s protector, as a huntress she’s everyone’s protector. I want to be her in every way imaginable.

The “Rule of Cool” in character designs, which is that if something is cool enough it deserves to exist is so very alive to me, and gosh is Yang cool. she’s cocky, her personality and silhouette is so big and massive and imposing. “let’s kiss and make up then you’ll learn” is such a good lyric for her from the song about her “i burn”. These attributes of her and the rule of cool are all things that i identify with myself. I’m also massive and cocky and i think i’m awesome but i am literally Ivern in red flannel. Yang does the whole damn thing, looks the part, saves the day sometimes, has an emotional background and gets bitches all while being so so human.

To continue on with Yang’s cool factor i want to touch on her design as a whole. It’s perfect, that’s just a fact. My favorite part about her is her hair. Big wavy hair that gives her a massive anchor in her design as well as giving her a unique silhouette compared to other characters in the show. Secondly her outfits she wears in different volumes are always the best. Her outfits are practical, and look like they totally belong to a biker girl who beats the shit out of you. Even down to her more finite details, like the purple bandana around her knee which relates to her relationship with Blake.

A tertiary point about yang that’s fundamental in *why* i like her so much is how she is this strong, imposing and daunting character, but she’s still presented as feminine. The way that rwby as a show presents Yang as a whole and tows a line between allowing Yang to be a masculine aligned berserker while not falling on “butch” tropes is so important to me. Yang is almost an entire new breed of femininity, one that i align with a lot.

Yang is so very much a part of me, But so is this fucking asshole.

POWER SWEEEEEEEEP i love Power for so many reasons that are so painfully simple.

Her backstory or storyline isn’t a tragedy like Yang or even Denji. Her backstory is just she was a lonely freak and found a cat. It’s so simple, yet i relate to it in my own way. And it’s so important to me to relate to a character in my own way. Never in my life have i found a character i related to, not once. And power gets me somewhat close to that feeling we all deserve.

Power borrows from the “Rule of Cool” less than yang, but is still great from a design wise on her own. When i first saw her in the intro i figured she was going to be a typical boring shonen-girl-type, but i was immediately proved wrong. Her human form design is so simple but portrays so much about her. The devil horns constantly present in her design are testament to her troublemaker attitude, which are contrasted by the business shirt and tie that she shares with her peers in public safety. **Spoilers for the ending of CSM part 1** When she assumes her devil form upon coming back from getting bang’d she’s a crazy looking monster, similar to kindred (who i also love dearly). This monstrous form she assumes for only a few pages are easily my favorite moment in chainsaw man as a whole. There’s just something right about this asshole getting to be a monster for like 10 min and giving up her life to save her state appointed brother

Power is, for all intensive purpose, a comedic relief character - in a show about horrible miserable topics with a messed up sense of humor, which is another trait i find relatable, i’m also the comedic relief girl.

Thankfully Power isn’t *just* her awful traits that make her hilarious and ridiculous. She’s a dutiful protector, of Meowy and of Denji in later chapters. She’s shown to have deep seeded fears in her character, her submission to makima, her impairing fear of the dark after darkness devil. These additions into her silly persona make her a well rounded, entertaining and fun character.

These two characters aren’t related at all, besides both being from shonens. As personality’s, their both big, loud and powerful which is the key element that makes me so attuned to them. The shows i watched in 2022, and subsequently become obsessed and consumed by shaped me as a person completely. And having characters for the first time in my life i saw myself in has been a liberating experience. I truly understand what TB Skyen meant when he said: “sometimes characters are important”.

#rwby #yang xiao long #chainsaw man power #chainsaw man #character design #small essay #tb skyen inspired #rambling

[gameofthronedd]

Everytime I see someone make a joke about the Larys SA scene or Alicent getting SA'd by Viserys or Alicent not having an orgasm in her life, I'm reminded that victim blaming/shaming is present in Team Black and prevalent even among women.

(And I'd be lying if I said that my blood doesn't boil everytime I see one of these stupid jokes 😮‍💨)

#tw: sa mention #tw: sex mention #pro alicent hightower #anti hotd fandom #team green #like alright hate on Alicent all you want but mocking her & joking abt SA is LOW and very insensitive #i would do a whole ass essay on the hypocrisy of TB on this matter and whatnot but i won't (yet) #something something solidarity!!

[akuasucc]

ok so the tiktoks about sports admin being male dominated are true 🧍🏾‍♀️

#not talking abour my classes cus #there are women in it #im tb like the actual field #like im inside the falcons office and im the onlt girl here #and they all talking and im just sitting here… #anyways im finishing my essays for my finals while they talk 😭 #gotta take advantage of the down time

[petrodragonicapocalypse]

apparently b&tb nation is in our collective feels this fine wednesday so it seems like a good time to post my obligatory hyperfixation playlist teehee

#restraining myself from writing a small essay on why each song is on there but just know that in my mind the dots are fucking CONNECTED #sorry that this is mostly 00's and 10's indie rock i swear i listen to other things but it just felt right for this idk #ngl this is right up there with my blackbeard's sad girl playlist its a banger #bunny and the bull #bunny and the bull (2009) #music #playlist #my posts #Spotify #b&tb fave

[merriclo]

writing a college essay rn and i know damn well im gonna get these bitches’ attention

#no one else is submitting an essay about how interested they are in rabies and tb and smallpox and the plagues

[marzipanandminutiae]

Hey, I saw the ask about the Winchester House and in the tags you mentioned not liking a certain youtuber’s video about Crimson Peak? Would you be willing to go into the issues with “tuberculosis chic”? I’m curious to learn more, I tried watching the video and something bothered me so I stopped but I wasn’t sure what exactly.

K*z R*we's video (censoring to avoid tags, per usual)? Yeah it. Did not sit well with me.

In brief, I feel like the whole pop history "Victorian women wanted to look like they had TB!!!!" concept is a bit backwards. Because of pre-existing beauty standards, consumption was considered a romantic and elegant/artistic disease. A pink-and-white complexion and clear skin (as well as a degree of weakness and delicacy) had been the feminine ideal in most western countries for a very long time before tuberculosis really hit its European peak in the 18th and 19th centuries. The fact that TB imparted those traits changed the perception of the disease, rather than the disease impacting what people considered beautiful.

Nobody sat down and thought "gee, I want to look like I'm dying of consumption!" It seems more like "gee, this look is pretty and women with TB look like this; what a romantic, feminine way to die!" to me.

So to apply the whole Tuberculosis Chic concept to Crimson Peak doesn't really seem apt? Apart from the fact that nobody in the movie has tuberculosis, you never think anybody has tuberculosis, and Edith doesn't look ~*more beautiful and delicate*~ when she's ill (her squint gets worse, she's shuffling around hunched over, her hair appears brittle and faded...)- it's also just Not A Thing. It's trying to analyze media through a lens that doesn't exist.

Also the video doesn't really seem to know what it wants to say, I thought. There's mention made of mourning clothes, especially in reference to Lucille. And, while there are certainly mourning references in the costuming- and two instances of actual mourning clothing shown onscreen -Lucille's outfits are. Distinctly not mourning. Yes, even the black one. Yes, even by the standards of the time. Then that thread of analysis doesn't really go anywhere or loop back to the central (again, historically unsupported) idea of Consumption Chic.

I don't know. It just wasn't my thing, personally. I'm sure that YouTuber has wonderful videos on other subjects, but the CPeak one kind of damaged my trust in them

#ask #goldenbloodytears #video essays #victorian fashion #crimson peak #like Edith coughing up blood is definitely a reference to the wasting consumptive heroine in Gothic novels but #I don't really think that informs the costuming #since as I said she looks appreciably worse the sicker she gets #her most Beautiful moments are when she's ~*The Golden Butterfly*~ full of life and energy #not when she's (as Hawley said) 'a withered husk' #which seems like a really cool SUBVERSION of the TB Makes You Beautiful concept! #because obviously you DON'T look more beautiful when you're literally dying!

[jaaankiey]

jankiey stop analyzing object characters with wildly different motives and attributes compared to the canon source material challenge

(failed)

#jankiey talking #godddddd thinking about tennis ballll in the context of that one angst fic #like i have the need to always write an essay about motives and reasons behind actions #esp since in the “maybe you can wish under a star?” i personally think....... #that what tb did was very grey area #at least i hope thats how the writing puts it idk i ain't that great great #but im losing it i love doing extreme character analysis on the blorbos #*hard stares at leafy #and pin #and also tennisball* #maybe one day........... #also if you see another weird off the rocker leafpin fic in the next few days #its all because i was thinking this way

[kafkaesquekitten]

ISTFG, if I see another artist depict CORE Frisk as a Big Boobie Bimbo, I will fucking lose it!

Not only is practice amoral, it ruins what makes CORE Frisk unique as a character!

CORE Frisk was an average human child who became an omnipresent deific entity when they were shattered across spacetime (Yes, exactly like Gaster.), and their canonical character design communicates this wonderfully with their monochromatic color scheme, and their pair of empty black pupilless eyes. This makes them appear as a ghost of Frisk, which, they basically are.

While their design does its job effectively, it is unfortunately, a tad simple for my taste.

However, CORE Frisk's plainness provides the perfect opportunity for artists to elaborate on their design.

Usually, I love seeing artists' takes on the adorable void child, but I absolutely despise when they're depicted as an oversexualized anime girl, destroying their androgyny, desecrating their spooky Samara Morgan energy, and detracting from what their original design was trying to do.

Anyways, here's my doodle of CORE Frisk as an imperfect example of how not to ruin their design:

#core!frisk #art #oversexualization #the sad enby #enby #undertale #underverse #what? no i didnt steal my essay writing style from tb skyen! #shut up!!!11!!!!!!1111 #underrated artist

[andromedabyweyesblood]

does anyone have book recs? i’m the middle of moving in/out and not really able to pick up a book right now so i wanted something easily digestible to read on my phone

#it doesn’t have to be something silly or idk #just easily digestible!!! gonna look on my own i guess #i started reading deathless last week and though it’s Good it’s too dense for me tb #rn* think i’m gonna choose an essay or something like that #biographies #eve babitz! been wanting to read something from her for so long but it’s so expensible #maybeeeee

[ohnoitstbskyen]

On God of War and "canon" in Norse mythology

Playing God of War: Ragnarök and reading writing about it reminds me of something a lot of people have trouble internalizing about Norse myth, which is is that

The vast, overwhelming majority of Norse mythology is lost and

There is no "canon" in Norse mythology

The concept of "canon" in religion is, at least in the west, very much a Christian thing (yes, it's also a feature of other religions). The idea that there is an authorized, central, divinely ordained, "official" central set of facts which are true, and everything else is fanfiction at best or heresy at worst.

And this is something we've taken with us into our general media criticism, hundreds of thousands of words exchanged between people debating which parts of Star Wars or the MCU are canon, or endlessly cycling through interpretations of what parts of Tolkien's mythos apply to each part of the Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit. I've participated in those discussions, and they can be a lot of fun, but it's worth remembering that this is only one of multiple ways to approach writing and narrative.

Norse mythology has no canon. There is no set of texts that have been declared by any central authority to be "the truth" of the Allfather, or the most correct depiction of Thor. Even in its own time, before its suppression by Christianity, Viking-age sailors, farmers and warriors would not have understood their religious practise as bounded by a finite and defined set of stories. It was an oral tradition, transmitted by telling and re-telling.

Your skjald knows some stories of the gods, maybe the guy the next town over knows some different ones, and maybe you go on a trading journey with a guy from Norway who knows completely different stories and you take those home with you where they become a part of the local rotation.

The primary sources for most Norse mythology (and certainly for God of War: Ragnarök) are the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda, two collections of texts compiled in the 13th century in Iceland by Snorri Sturluson, a Christian poet and politician, as well as possibly other contributors at the same time.

They are limited by their geography, consisting only of those stories that survived in Iceland, and limited by their time period. The Viking Age is generally considered to have ended around 1050 CE, so Sturluson was compiling these stories two hundred years after the time when Norse paganism would have been the dominant religious practise in Scandinavia or indeed Iceland.

We have other sources than the Eddas, of course, but they are painfully limited: Runestones and archeological artifacts, as well as stories told about the Vikings by people who weren't them, which obviously comes with a lot of biases. The Viking-era Scandinavians themselves simply didn't leave any substantial body of written sources that survived.

Sturluson being a Christian, writing for Christian audiences, also introduces a lot of suspicion of tampering. He might have had incentive to avoid recording certain stories, for fear of being accused of spreading heresy, and he may have edited or altered aspects of the stories he did record to make them palatable to his audience, or to serve his own political purposes. This, of course, is a concern with any author writing anything ever, but since Sturluson is quite literally our only source for so many of these stories, it is impossible to check his work against competing narratives.

The consequence of all of this is that the vast majority of Norse mythology is lost. We do not know the vast majority of what that old religious practise was, we do not know the vast majority of its stories. This was a set of beliefs and stories told and transmitted across populations ranging from what is now the inland plains of Germany to the heights of the mountains of Norway to the shores and harbors of Denmark to parts of modern day Russia. These disparate populations would have had an absolutely enormous range of shared and local religious practises, they would have emphasized and cared about different gods, they would have absorbed and incorporated stories from neighboring religious groups.

This has a couple of consequences. For one thing, the whiny pissbabies crying about Angrboða being portrayed as a person of color in God of War: Ragnarök because "there were no black people in Norse mythology!" are, indeed, full of piss and expired baby oil. They don't know that, because nobody knows that.

Viking sailors made it as far as Constantinople and old Norse was once spoken in parts of Crimea. They even managed to make it across the goddamn Atlantic to found a settlement in Newfoundland, so the idea that old Norse peoples wouldn't know what a person of color is or tell stories about them is just absurd on the face of it. We have no direct evidence that they told stories about gods of color, but to look at the tiny snapshot provided by one Christian poet writing for a Christian audience in Iceland two hundred years after the Christianization of Scandinavia and confidently concluding that people of color couldn't possibly have existed in the Norse imagination is like finding the Q key off a keyboard lying on the ground and concluding there can be no such thing as vowels or the letter L.

The tiny sliver of Norse mythology that has survived to the modern day should to a modern reader be a prompt to imagine the vast possibility of what has been lost, not a reason to reduce the entire culture of my ancestors to whatever bits that were left by the time some dude in Iceland found it interesting and convenient to write them down.

Which leads us on to the other interesting consequence of the facts of Norse mythology.

It is an oral tradition, with no central canon and no central authority, whose religious practises were local and varied, whose stories were designed to be shared and picked up by whoever finds them compelling. Which means that any story we tell, now, about the gods that we find compelling is every bit as "canon" as anything that survives in the Eddas.

Which is to say: not canon at all, unless you decide to believe in it. Or, hell, even if you just find it enjoyable.

God of War: Ragnarök is as canon as Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology is as canon as Jul i Valhal that ran on Danish TV in 2005 is as canon as the MCU Thor, is as canon as the Prose Edda, is as canon as the half-remembered re-telling of Norse myth I heard from my Danish teacher in class in 1998.

It is often very difficult for a lot of modern audiences to free themselves from the idea of "canon." We seem to instinctively want a certain set of stories to be "the real ones," a certain narrative to be the "official" one, and set adrift without that sense of central authority to guide us, a lot of people exhibit what I would call an almost resentful anxiety. If none of it is definitely true, then what is even the point of any of it? If you can't know for sure which story is the most real, then all of it must be meaningless!

And yeah. It's easy to feel that way. We live in the Age of Canon, the era of the cinematic universe and the franchise, the epoch of copyright. But that is only one way to understand stories and narrative.

If you listen to the stories of the old gods, whether out of the Eddas or re-told in pop culture, and you take some of that with you, and you pass the good bits on to someone else, then you are participating in the oldest and most sacred tradition of Norse mythology. These stories do not belong to any one author (especially not the goddamn Mouse!) or even to any one people. They were telling stories of Thor along the rivers of Russia a thousand years ago, Viking sailors scratched their names in runes in the Hagia Sophia, Islamic artifacts have been found in Viking burials. Those who look at the tradition of my ancestors and feel compelled to do enclosure around them are fools and charlatans, fearful and small-minded.

Our stories are monopolized these days by capital. Canon to them is a tool of enclosure, a way to shut people out of participating in the modern mythology they are trying to build, except with their permission and profit in mind. But there is another way.

Listen to the stories and pass them on. The story you believe in won't be the one everyone likes, and the version you tell won't be the same version someone else passes on from you. But every telling takes the soul of the teller with it, and the stories we weave together in communal tradition become a picture of every storyteller who has contributed to them. And you spite the fucking Mouse.

#tb essay #god of war #gow ragnarok #norse mythology #norse gods #history #prose edda #poetic edda #loki #thor #odin #angrboða

[michael-something]

Sadie the college tapes ❤️

I think her character is so important, Ive seen people headcannon her as trans but tbh I like that shes cisgender hetero, and no its not "cishet people exist too they need rep in media just as much" thats not what I'm saying here.

But in her conversation with Adam she specifically states that shes straight and calls him out for stereotyping which I LOVE

Call me "qUirKy" but I love how the show uses this scenario to go against steriotypes

Its can be so personal

#the bright sessions #the college tapes #sadie the college tapes #tbs #tct #this isnt me saying you cant headcannon her as trans do what u want its just my thoughts #my english grade if i could write essays like i write character analysis' 📈 #analysises??? #analasi???

[gyeheoni]

wait one more thing before i go to sleep have you all seen the jaeyun essays my friends wrote for me HDKDJDJDJ 😔😔😔

#xixi’s first fact is not entirely tru but i appreciate the effort 🥺 #FOR CONTEXT … #i asked people on twt if they knew who jaeyun was bc of me #and then if they said they did they had to tell me whomst in essay format LMAO (as a joke) #and i got real essays u.u #the jaeyun x100 is so funny to me beloved <333 #anyway good night fr 😔 #not vrvr #🌱.text #tb dl

[troythecatfish]

#tb skyen #art video #grief #tw grief #grief/mourning #grief art #video essay #art #artwork #art history #tumblr recommendations #recommend #recommendation #youtube recommendations #video recommendation #youtube #youtube content #youtube link #video link

[landlordevil]

"This is the second time you've put your hands on me" "yes, and when you're slapped you'll take it and you'll like it" Mr. Hammett... why did you write this

#tb to when i wrote an essay about the homoeroticism of the movie #glad to see its in full force in the book too

[petrodragonicapocalypse]

hrhrgrgh i've got a bunny and the bull (2009) theory bouncing around in my brain

heavy spoilers below the cut

so you know how the entire film is a study on the idea of an unreliable narrator, the tendency of the storyteller to exaggerate, and the fickle nature of memory.

obviously its pretty unlikely that someone with no bullfighting experience would be able to pull off Bunny's bullfight. I think the surrealism of the scene and the contrast with the abrupt realism of the bull's final charge could be intended to draw a line between imagination and reality. my theory is that the clockwork bullfight dance scene was added in Stephen's retelling.

as bleak as it sounds, I think the bull actually gored Bunny pretty much straight away. the dream-like matador sequence is Stephen's way of confronting the event and making it bearable. I think it's also his way of honouring Bunny and remembering him as he would want to be remembered. leading up to the bullfight, present-day Stephen knows that Bunny is going to die, and at this point the audience has probably guessed it too. but instead of seeing it as a pointless death from a stupid bet, he makes it into something beautiful - an epitaph to his friend who was so full of excitement and thrill and life - and because of this he's able to face the reality of what comes next.

(side note: this is just some thoughts I had while watching the film, I'd be curious to see if other people thought this too. I'm not trying to definitively prove either way - ambiguity rules - just speculating.)

#the first time i watched the film i actually knew what going to happen to bunny because im an idiot and i read the plot summary #but then!! you get a few minutes of the most beautiful cinema youve ever seen in your life. it took me completely off guard #and i think thats kind of similar to what stephen felt in that moment idk #anyway this post is courtesy of the b&tb essay in my soul thats currently leaking out on to all of your tumblr dashboards #bunny and the bull #bunny and the bull (2009) #my posts