#that filter is like wow

[mblue-art]

hhappy pocky day 11/11!! here's some self-indulgence ft oreo man///

#mblue art #self insert #cross!sans #forgive the cursing but oh my god im so fucking gay for cross what is this doki doki bullshit (it is 3am) #'just a quick doodle' i said; hrs earlier #'hey lets try to color it more actually' - 'oh no its cute' #anyway bless references 🙏 glad they exist #also unFAIR a pocky game AND a kabedon??? WOW this is what i get for giving him 2 boxes of choco and cookies and cream pocky??? smfh #its like he cranked up his rizz meter and went all in #ok im shutting up before the brain filter yeets outta my head #guys forgive my 3am sleep deprived brain it's running on simp fuel istg #@ that friend who encouraged me to draw the idea you know who u are (index pointing emoji) #pocky #CM

[spirk-trek]

S3E17: That Which Survives ⋆.˚ ✧ · ˚⊹ ·

#sulu #hikaru sulu #wow he looks so prettyyy #this planet is like a beauty filter everyone looks so SO!!!!!!!!!!!! #that which survives #star trek #star trek the original series #tos #star trek tos #scifi #1960s #george takei #television #space #sparkles #sci fi #science fiction #screencaps

[mamawasatesttube]

impressive. just looked at the timkon tag on ao3 and not one fic on the front page today is actually about timkon.

#rimi talks #like... i wasnt expecting much from the timkon tag bc it is after all always a hellscape #but wow! the bar was low and yet... #*dont tell me about filters i know how to use filters thats not the point of this observation #the point is that i think its grating when a ship is treated as just the default setting in the background #like you just HAVE to pair them off even if youre not writing about either of them as characters #this is grating behavior to me. broadly pervasive but grating #anyways im mostly just whining bc im having such an awful fatigue day out of the blue and that makes me grumbly #like i CAN filter and i DO use filters but also the fact that the ship tag is So incredibly unusable bc of default treatment is annoying yk

[marshmellowtea]

i'm sorry but mai making zuko leaving his abusive father and imperialist shitty nation behind about her is so fucking annoying lmao

#i forgot how actually irritating this scene is like wow girl get a grip please #maybe i do dislike her actually SKSJGLKDSJF #avatar the last airbender #anti mai #anti maiko #putting those tags on there for filtering reasons ofc #marshy speaks

[rapidhighway]

awesome long post about sonic and shadow you love finished by mentioning untagged sonadow in the last sentence to piss you off

#CAN YOU PLEASE TAG YOUR SHIPS #some people dont want to see the offhand mention of it either #like my entire dash is FULL of filtered posts right now and then i see the ONE post that isn't flagged #and its about sonic and shadow wow yay i can finally read something about them #and its of course just untagged shit #like idk how to explain this to the shippers but seeing everything there interpreted as ship makes me just not want them around each other #at all in the show because i know how tiring being on the internet will be afterwards #AND IM TRYING TO AVOID THAT BY FILTERING POSTS #but i keep getting untagged sonadow on my dash

[briarfangs]

Scar….. what are you doing here? This is the mounders base..!

#trafficblr #secret life #the mounders #pearlescentmoon #shyly puts this here #I’m worried this isn’t stuff people want to see but. I’m SURE someone is gonna see this and be like #‘oh wow!!! lps secret life!!! that’s so cool!’ #if y all want me to tag it as something in particular so u can filter it lmk! :D

[liu-yu-xin]

its literally just photoshop 😭 like an ungodly amount of photoshop

#but i do kind of like when a fansite has a really distinctive way of editing and colouring #to this day i could recognize beforesunrise's photos of yuxin #as opposed to the ones that just slap a whitening filter on thats not only unethical but also lazy. work for it. #sometimes u get so used to seeing the lovingly photoshopped fansite photos and u see a raw ass gettys image photo #from an western event where the photographer doesnt care if u live or die and takes the photo at an angle to make them look 5ft2 and no #skin blurring and its really quite jarring #like wow u look like a real person made of skin and flesh for once #sidney talks shit

[liesyousoldme]

ugh when someone you like ends up being a sleeper billy stan 😔

#i have his name (and all his ship names) filtered but i click on them anyway #bc USUALLY it’s just him being mentioned in a fic AS THE BAD GUY bc he is. you know. A Bad Guy #but then you click it and it’s one of your blorbos being kissed by Mr Wanted To Kill A Child For Being Black #and it’s like wow. my eyes being assaulted in my own home. #anti billy hargrove #tw racism

[150151]

going into the sucker punch tag expecting to see posts and gifsets about the girls only for half the posts to be fanfics about oscar isaacs character and how hot he is

#for a split second i forgot theres ppl that like men #i know i shouldn't be shocked but wow there really is no escape i fear #i have that mans name filtered and i scrolled past more posts about him and his other characters than the actual movie i searched for

[astranauticus]

todays orv mood: standing at the water dispenser under my dorm building waiting for my instant noodles to cook just pacing in circles and swearing

#orv liveblog #should i tag spoilers for like. ramble in tags?? #ok i'll do it just to be safe #orv spoilers #idk in case my webtoon only irl friend suddenly decides to log back into her tumblr after 3 years #context chapter 311/46th scenario #ok theres a lot going on here #first off 1863th round yjh is a character made to haunt me specifically so when the name hell of eternity came up wow i was feeling like #500 emotions at once and none of them were good #second i saw someone on lofter say today that most of the talking kdj and yjh do in this book is through fights and just #LIKE I JUST. cannot get over how our perspective of their relationship is just always being filtered through these two people #who are just fuckin INCAPABLE of TALKING ABOUT THEIR FEELINGS like NORMAL PEOPLE #like it drives me so insane that this book is so show dont tell by necessity bc kdj is a fucking moron so we just get these #insanity inducing details like yjh paying to extend his midday rendezvous with kdj for 3 years and just using it as a personal journal #and then you get past all the fuckin. the two of them beating the shit out of each other by way of communicating and its like #'i want to lock you up so you'll stop dying because im scared im not strong enough to be able to stop you and we cant lose you again' LIKE? #SIR WHAT??????? HELLO?????????????? #also the line that made me start pacing in circles around the water cooler while swearing in mandarin was specifically #'i couldn't be the protagonist. i couldn't save someone else' #says the DEMON KING OF SALVATION. like damn its 'sacrifice's will is a stigma that didn't really suit me' all over again #like i love that kdj has the nerve to be like 'of course i dont want to die' and yjh just absolutely does not buy it for a second #god. i want to hit him on the head with a brick.

[gillianthecat]

re: The Novelist

c.c. @petrichoraline @sadday4sure @thewayofsubtext @waitmyturtles

I liked it. I liked it quite a lot. I'm still processing (/starting Mood Indigo), so I'm not sure if I have much I can articulate about it yet.

All I knew about it going in was the basic premise (pornography writer and his assistant) and that it was from the other side of Japan's BL traditions, meaning that it was "dark," contained dubcon, and was high heat. So I wasn't sure if it even was a romance or would have any sort of happy ending and thus I kept my heart to myself for the first few episodes, not trusting the show with it. I watched with a more analytical mindset at the beginning, which morphed into a love for the characters as they showed their own hearts.

Perhaps if I'd gone in unaware I would have found it dark and disturbing, but as it was a found it more aching and melancholy than anything else. The dubcon was no worse than other shows I've seen, and fit the story and the themes better than many (I won't get into those comparisons here). There was angst and loneliness and lashing out, but the power never felt overly weighted toward Kijima's side, despite Kuzami's youth and relative innocence, and the tangle of debts and their work relationship.

The actors were all excellent. I was relieved to see that my newfound love Izuka Kenta (who I'd seen for all of 5 minutes of screen time in Candy Color Parodox) is in fact very good actor, and brought nuance and strength and complex desires to the part of Kuzami.

I can't help but comparing shows to other shows these days, so here is what I was thinking while watching this one. The Novelist came out favorably, if it was a comparison of quality.

There is of course the use of dubcon, for which my only other real reference point are Thai BL, and that analysis is a multi-tentacled beast that is would get me off track for the rest of this post, so I won't start on it. I will say that one thing I noticed was that the pornographic fantasies were generally (all?) dubcon ones, and that both affected my interpretation of the characters' feelings about the real dubcon scene (because they both were into dubcon in fantasy), and habituated me to seeing dubcon in the show by the time the fifth episode came around. The other thing I guess I will say is that it feels different to me, easier to tolerate and move past, to see one character violate another out of sadness and fear and the desire to push someone away and hold them close at the same time. In real life absolutely no, the reason for ignoring consent matters not, but seeing it in a story I can work with that.

And then there are the pornographic fantasies, which were used so interestingly here. They were our (and seemingly Kuzami's) introduction to desire and sex. They usually featured other actors portraying the porn characters, which at first bothered me - I wanted more time with Kijima and Kuzami as they wrote together - but then came to make sense, for reasons I can't articulate now. The show's seduction of us followed Kijima's only half intentional seduction of Kuzami. It lured us in with his voice dryly describing lurid sex acts, sounding humorous at first, but soon grew more genuinely erotic as the music and the cinematography and Kijima's voice changed. And there was something about the way the porn fantasies provided both distance from the characters and simultaneously made them seem even more vulnerable, their minds laid even more bare than their bodies, that created this uncomfortable, seductive eroticism of the show. Kijima was arousing Kuzami while still pretending Kuzami's arousal was meaningless to him.

Which was part of why I didn't know what to expect from the show at first. Was this going to be an overcast and complicated story of self-discovery, about how Kuzami was changed by one summer with this seductive twisted older man? It wasn't until Kido showed up and Kijima fell slightly to pieces, that I understood that it would be both their stories, and that I could hope for romance rather than just sexual awaking, even though I wasn't yet sure of a happy ending.

The fantasies too changed over the course of the series, going from the ones about men and women that Kijima wrote, to Kuzami's fantasies of the two of them, and then disappeared altogether, as they stopped wanting a fantasy and started their convoluted paths to wanting and seeing each other's real selves, not the fantasy version.

(The comparison about fantasies in my mind, which I probably only thought of due to a coincidence of timing, was to the innocent romantic fantasies of My School President. Which despite the very different content, share a similar role of showing the character's desires to the audience, and of pointing to the contrast between unrealistic fantasy and the reality of loving and being loved by another actual human being with their own subjectivity in the world.) (This honest dive into arousal while creating erotic art in collaboration with someone desired was what I was vaguely hoping for, though did not expect, from Oh! My Assistant. So I was glad to have it done so well here.)

Closely connected to the fantasies was how much the show was about writing. Both literally, a good portion of screen time was spent watching Kuzami writing Kanji and listening to to Kijima recite the words of the novel, and in that Kijima's story was about his journey as a writer. I felt the pain of his not being able to write, I felt the isolation of "writer" being his only identity, his only sense of self. This was what I wanted from Happy Ending Romance, which frustratingly did not feel like it was really about writers. This very much did. I could dig deeper into why it felt that way, but this post is already much longer than I meant for it to be.

The focus of the story was so tightly held on Kuzami and Kijima in their time together that fevered summer. We learned very little about them beyond their moments together. And I think that works. It builds the heightened intensity of their connection with each other, like they're living in a world apart from the rest. Kijima seems to have been living in this isolation for most of his life, while Kuzami apparently has friends and classes and a life outside this bubble, but it is Kijima whose backstory we end up learning more about. In a less nuanced show Kuzami would be almost a blank slate, ready to be molded* by Kijima's desires, but Izuka Kenta and the subtleties of the script imbue him with a quiet strength. At the beginning he doesn't yet know what he wants, but when he figures it out he has a solidity of purpose that won't let him be pushed around.

*yes it's a mixed metaphor but I didn't like any of the matching sets I could think of

And he sees Kijima, because he so desperately want to. Once he figures out that it's Kijima he wants, he works so hard to get under his mask and see him. Despite Kijima doing his damnedest not to be seen. Takezai Terunosuke is excellent in the role, playing both the Mona Lisa mask and the broken man beneath, and showing the cracks to get there. When he broke down in tears, back to Kuzami... I cried. This show, which I thought was going to be about how Kuzami was changed by their time together, ended up being about how Kijima was changed by him.

I feel like I'm talking circles around the center of them, but there is so much that could be said, so many ways to examine their relationship.

Oh! and the cinematography/editing/sound/etc! So good. I kept thinking about everyone's brilliant responses to my questions on this post, and really noticed the use of wide long shots and letting the actors come in and out of frame. It served the story well.

This was my first "dark" JBL, and I want to watch more now, to better put this show in context.

Fuck, y'all. This was supposed to be a single paragraph simply stating that I liked the show. And maybe naming a few topics I found interesting. Instead it swelled into this, and still feels very incomplete. But I will leave the rest for another day. Especially as I expect I will have an even more thoughts on the characters after watching the rest of the series.

#the novelist #pornographer series jbl #japanese bl #thoughts on consent and boundary violations in bl #gillianthecat reacts to bl #conversations with blblr #conversations with qlblr #my ramblings #wow that's a lot of words #no [editing] we die like men #how deep #do i need to bury tags #in order to keep them out of searches #but still let people filter them #hopefully this is deep enough #(wrote kijima in his latest novel) #my school president #oh my assistant #candy color paradox #happy ending romance

[blueiight]

Its little things like the episode titles & the context of each scene they drew the title from in the book that rly shows the showrunners’ love for the source. iwtv as an individual book is a work of art, a tragicomedy of untold proportions. its where reading thru what louis did not say weaves a whole new tale from what he did say.

#yn. #iwtv #tvc #thinking of the show too. like how in 1x07 he tries to project his own feelings of refusing to burn lestat onto claudia #And thinking of how the show draws upon the wider chronicles to make a far more complete yet still filtered POV of les… #& Clauds. like #wow #a loveletter. a show in convo w the chronicles even

[victimized-martyr]

oh to be hired as mattrey’s brain trust for a run and help the story be completed on time and support trey where he needed it …

#haha whattt i didn’t listen to an hour podcast from Susan hurwitz arneson abt her experience on the show hhha #the way she described it too fjjfkf ‘matt and trey are so welcoming and understand pitching is vulnerable. I still cried at day 3’ #sighhhh what a dreammm #she also wrote a south park spec and ended up talking to anne?? and basically being a fan got her in the show??? wow #she’s a ‘writer’ in the room but is credited as a consultant which Fair i get it fr fr #omg when she said ‘i don’t form the larger storylines but sometimes my jokes and lines end up bein on the show filtered through trey’s #genius brain and i feel great’ im LIKE HOOOO #it’s also fascinating how she said that she had to find her ‘role’ in the room #like there’s plot characters jokes and story and she ended up bein the story trust #she said that ppl don’t stay long in the room and sometimes it’s for arbitrary reasons and i’m like that’s ok! I animate I also board #bitch i can do the lipsync too idgaf I HAVE done and will do it

[eevyerndracaneon]

I got drunk for the first time ever tonighththt

#shocking how much motor control i still have #amd control in general #okay im still typoing but like #wow #didnt know id still feel like a person just wih like #no filter #less control #i just wanna smother cam with kissies but jes making me drink water #bc he doesnt want me to be hungover

[insaneclownpussi]

wild day yesterday that ended in an intervention for my dad. but really what i cant stop thinking about is the person i kissed right before i left austin…

#one of my fave things abt myself is how intense i am when i first get involved w someon lollll #i used to look back on my first relationship and be like #wow i had no filter when i was 16 i did/said so many things that were off the wall #like TATTOOING my crush’s POETRY. ON MY BODY #anyways i’ve realized this past year that it actually had nothing to do w being 16 im just like that 🤪 #i love a grand gesture. like driving 8 hours for a date. or going on one date and then reading someones 400 pg thesis #ahhhhh i feel like my brain is on fire!! i need to be kissing i need to be fucking etc etc #jackson knows what they’re getting into so 🤷🏻‍♂️ #the thing w my dad was wild lol never a dull holiday here

[atramentous-soul]

beta vs. alpha teo pt. 3

#wow there's so much #i forgot how many CGs they had #honestly i'm so glad for the art change #i feel like beta teo's art was made with a photo of a staff that they put a filter on and drew over #ssum teo #the ssum #the ssum spoilers #beta teo #beta the ssum #my post #pics #cheritz #teo comparison