Just someone who's fascinated by all the ways in which we interact with stories. This blog is not so much meta on fan culture as an examination of fan activity. Right now my main fandoms are Merlin and The Hobbit, though on tumblr, The Hobbit dominates.
They’re not going to indoctrinate themselves, ya know.
I also had:
or
I had way too many options: control, constrain, restrain, shackle, hinder, hobble, limit, neutralize, mentally euthanize, undermine, block the children, brainwash the children …
Con the Children
Oh, won’t somebody please control the children?
Condemn the children, convict the children— won’t somebody please conscript the children for cannon fodder, for canon clatter, just dogma splatter. Please, conceive of “children” as indistinct matter— moldable, trainable, constrainable. Oh, everybody please, consider the children as formless abstracts— as brutal bullets of sophistry, as kangaroo contests of sympathy.
Convert the children to bricks in thrall.
Contain the children, for multitudes challenge preconceptions, prompt receptiveness, promote connection— confine the children, lest they learn diversity. Convince the children of limitations, that salvation is members-only; restrict the children’s contemplations, restrain them from questioning, consign them to ignorance.
Cancel the children’s individualities, erase their personalities, make them conform— raze them to blankness, then tabulate “normal” and “proper” and “moral”. Construct The Children as props, as cudgels, to beat, berate, obfuscate, to turn conversations into self-congratulatory muggings— to proselytize, delegitimize, dehumanize— to valorize violence. For the children.
Warn the children that the content of their characters is no concern of yours.
Think of the children, but don’t allow them to think for themselves.
But you are responsible for your own safe spaces. You can block tags, block words, block people.
“But i thought fandom was supposed to be a safe space” —yeah you have to curate it.
Unfortunately one persons’s safe space may be another persons’ trigger. That’s ok. Simply block them, block the tag, block the word etc. They can do the same for you.
Maybe I’m just out of touch, but I’ve been around since the days of “don’t like, don’t read” and that’s a good philosophy. If it squicks you, scroll past. If it causes you anxiety or upset, block! Plenty of people are responsive if you ask them to tag an upsetting trigger. And if they’re dicks about it, block em.
Since different people have different needs, one person’s safe space will be another’s Trauma Central.
I don’t know who said it first, but “I need to be able to express my anger without shame” and “I need to be away from yelling and loud noises” are both valid needs people can have for a safe space that really aren’t compatible with each other.
So are “I need to process my trauma” and “I need to not meet any trauma.”
Or “I want a safe space to tell/read the stories that speak to me” and “those stories are distressing to me.”
Insisting that your needs are the only needs anyone should have is not a safe space, it’s its own act of violence.
You don’t get to make others homeless to make the universe your personal safe space.
“Insisting that your needs are the only needs anyone should have is not a safe space, it’s its own act of violence.”
The urban fantasy show I actually want to see is a hospital drama with a dedicated wing for supernatural illnesses.
Vampirism. Lycanthropy. Cheap spells gone wrong. A woman brought in for her prenatal has to be told her baby is a lindworm. Someone is literally being followed by the anthropomorphic personification of the Black Death.
Someone somewhere out there is having their perception of the world irreparably shattered by the knowledge that magic is real, and at the other side is a team of doctors who have to roll their eyes and pull out Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales because some high school kid tried to go Carrie with a cheap spellbook and turn all the kids at prom into frogs, and the doctors have to wrangle a couple dozen teenagers into admitting if they have a true love who can break the spell.
I want the hospital director to be some dark entity that feeds on human misery but figured out that if you successfully treat the source of the misery then instead of hunting you down as an abomination the humans start bringing more miserable people to your house en masse and things kinda got out of hand from there.
Plus make sure to take breaks regularly - and stop if anything starts to hurt!
especially with gift knitting I know it can be tempting to push through it for a deadline, but it’s really not worth causing long term injury. (And anyone knit-worthy should be understanding of that, imho.) Stay well :)
Also good for artists drawing with pencils/on a tablet/with a pen!
Do you ever get a wave of nostalgia for a hyperfixation that’s never coming back with the same sort of melancholy with which you mourn a lost childhood friend
The old horror movies also had deep symbolism you were just to young to know it!
Alien? Full of metaphors about sexuality and rape
Nightmare on Elm street? Metaphors about generational trauma and violence
Halloween? The inevitability of death
Friday the 13th? Fear of sexuality
I COULD GO ON!
HORROR HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT EXPLORING THE DARK UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY AND PIGEON HOLING IT AS LESSER ART IS A MISTAKE
Horror also reflects the anxieties of its time! The nuclear era of the 1950s showed us lots of mutants, monsters, and science gone bad. The ‘80s saw the golden age of serial killers (carried over from the ‘70s), suburban excess, reactionary conservatism, and Satanic Panic; thus we get slashers carving up wild-partying teens, plus creepy neighbors and home invasions. Current horror often deals with themes of alienation, gentrification, apocalypse/societal collapse, and pressure to perform an Instagram-perfect social veneer—you know, #JustLateCapitalismThings.
And yes, horror is in fact the Most important genre, culturally, politically, artistically, and philosophically.
Horror as a genre is always and has always been deeply political, casting light on social issues and anxieties, even in cases where the director wasn’t necessarily doing it on purpose. It’s a goldmine of media analysis and cultural study.
LJS 381 is a copy of Sallust’s works on the history of Rome. Originally written in the first century BCE, this copy was made in Padua, Italy, between 1455 and 1465. The binding is contemporary Italian blind-tooled goatskin over wooden boards
[image description: a quote that reads “Fan fiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of the folk.” The quote is attributed to Henry Jenkins, Director of Media Studies at MIT, 1997. end of description]
