collection of posts for a very specific dynamic
nothingelsetoseeherelol asked:
Ok this is a long shot but I’ve been looking for this for years. Circa maybe 2017. There used to be an artist on here that was a classically trained oil painter who painted these elegant scenes where the subject was always a twink model posed erotically with very poorly drawn MSPaint style anime guys as if it was a someone’s deviantart OC photoshopped into a picture, but it was all part of the painting. He would post his pieces displayed next to the irl twink model he painted. Help me find him
phillip-bankss answered:
Here is a free pdf of the players handbook
Here is a free pdf of xanathars guide to everything
Here is a free pdf to monsters manual
Here is a free pdf to tashas cauldron of everything
Here is a free pdf to dungeon master’s guide
Here is a free pdf to volo’s guide to monsters
Here is a free pdf of mordenkainen’s tomb of foes
For all your dnd purposes
Here’s a site that has literally every official (and most UA) dnd stuff
including the books and campaigns
and you can add homebrew
Hey rb this!!!
Guys don’t share this kinda thing people may use it to get access to the dnd source books for free instead of paying for them. This is extremely dangerous for the flawless company that wizards of the coast is.
Btw when someone says "don't talk to me like that, I don't know you" the normal thing to do is apologize for the perceived overfamiliarity and correct the behavior. Just in case anyone was wondering
If someone said that to me I would unironically dig an underground bunker by hand and only ever leave to pick up doordash orders and nobody would ever see me again ever holy shit
Alternatively I would just jump off a bridge immediately god damn even just reading that makes my soul want to fucking die
hey dude this is a really weird thing to say to a stranger!
Buddy you don't get it I would fucking perish
Hey dude i know rejection sensitive dysphoria is a thing but if you react this strongly to people setting simple boundaries you need to figure out how to work through that
Oh I deal with it. By being incredibly careful about anything I say to anyone in person ever
Although I once asked my cousin if I could join her dnd group (I have noclue how it works) and she went "Uh... No" and basically was like "you'd fuck it up" (she was very nice about it but damn I felt like the dumbest bitch alive ever)
And I haven't recovered since! So yeah that's why I'm a freak online because real life is impossible lmao! Hope this explains it!
That's not dealing with it but good luck I guess
Fyi, this is not only a bad way to deal with it bc it's straight up leaning into your own disordered thinking, but it's also EVEN MORE inconsiderate than the original offense of being overly familiar.
Y'all may not realize the things you do are manipulative, but responding to a fair boundary (that isn't even stated in a rude way) with "If anyone ever set this reasonable boundary with me I would run away into the woods" is manipulation. You are making it more difficult for people to feel safe telling you when you've made them uncomfortable or crossed a boundary, which means they'll likely respond by either cutting you off or allowing you to walk over their boundaries for fear of setting you off.
That's manipulative. You might genuinely be mortified, but that is something you NEED to work on, because the alternative is forcing everyone to walk on eggshells around you at the risk that politely setting any boundaries will set you off.
If you'd be fucked up if someone said that to you, that's understandable. I would be. So apologize politely, then deal with your own shit on your own time.
The band, the music, the dance.
puts on sound 📣🎶🎵
Ok, I NEED you to understand just how insane even ATTEMPTING this was for them.
1. Playing an instrument is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Don’t think I’m stepping on any toes saying that.
2. Dancing is difficult. Doing so in sync with others even more so. Still not controversial.
3. YOU AVOID, AT ALL COSTS, MOVING YOUR BODY WHILE PLAYING A WIND INSTRUMENT. To make the correct, pleasant sounds, you need to be in the correct form. And that form involves your ENTIRE body, even your legs when sitting down.
4. “oh, but I’ve seen marching bands before and-” MARCHING BANDS HAVE ENTIRE SCIENTIFIC FIELDS DEDICATED TO FIGURING OUT HOW TO MARCH WITH MINIMUM BREAKING OF PROPER FORM. A marching band tries to be as smooth as possible while moving, so as not to jar their instrument, mouth, neck, arms, torso, or anything else.These ladies and gentlemen are BOUNCING and still playing properly, what the FU-!
5. AND ANOTHER THING! Wind instruments and dancing BOTH make demands on your breathing, so the fact that they are dancing (making you breath faster for extra oxygen) AND playing wind instruments (making you effectively hold your breath) AT THE SAME TIME is HUGE. Their lungs must be MASSIVE.
All of that also; the song is Sing, sing, sing (with a swing). If you wanna listen to some of THE SPICIEST big band ever recorded. Its a big hard song and this band does it expertly.
I will. I will say ONE thing. As a wind instrument player, and very drunk atm for unrelated reason.
Most of the point above are correct, save for the first.
Playing in syncs with other is actually easier (Imhe, ymmv) due to a stronger base beat/rhythm/placement to follow and the ability to drop out when you need a breath knowing that there is plenty of volume to cover you and and that when you pop back in, you’ll know where you are thanks to following the players around you (and which point you then provide th same opportunity to your band mates)
The other points of course stand as posited.
One thing about fandom culture is that it sort of trains you to interact with and analyze media in a very specific way. Not a BAD way, just a SPECIFIC way.
And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you're supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.
Which is fine if you're looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.
But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well... that's how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.
I dont know what my point here is, really, except...like...I find it very funny when people are like "ugh. I hate Gatsby and Catcher because all the characters are shitty" which like....isnt....the point. Lololol you arent supposed to kin Gatsby.
I would definitely argue that it’s specifically a bad way….a very bad way.
Depending on the piece of media, it could be the intended way to interpret it and thus very effective. When I watch Sailor Moon, I know at the end of the day that Usagi is a hero. She is right, and her choices are good. She and the Sailor Scouts may make mistakes, and those mistakes can have consequences, but by presuming the goodness of the protagonists, I can accurately describe what actions and values the story is presenting as good. (Fighting evil by moonlight. Winning love by daylight. Never running from a real fight. Etc etc)
If I sit around and hem and haw about whether or not Usagi is actually the villain because she is destined to reinstate a magical absolute monarchy on Earth in the future, then I'm not interpreting it correctly. I can write a cool fanfic about it, but it wont be a successful analysis of the original work.
But like I said, that doesnt work for all pieces of media, and being able to assess how a piece of media should be analyzed is a skill in itself.
I was an English major. One of our required classes was Theory & Criticism, and I ended up hating it specifically because of the teacher and the way she taught it, but the actual T&C part of it was interesting. And one of the things we learned about was all the different ways of reading/interpreting/criticizing media - not just books, ANY form of media.
Specifically, I remember when we read The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. We had special editions of the book where the first half of it was the novel itself, and the last half was like five or six different critical analyses of the book from different schools of theory. The two I remember specifically were a Marxist interpretation and a feminist interpretation. I remember reading both of those and thinking “wow, these people are really reaching for some of this”, but the more I read into the analysis and the history of those schools of thought, the more I got it. So for my final paper for that class, I wrote an essay that basically had the thesis of “when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail”. If you have trained yourself to view every piece of media through a single specific critical lens - well, you’re going to be only viewing it through that lens, and that means you’re going to read or watch it in such a way that you’re looking for the themes you’ve trained yourself to look for.
My teacher didn’t like that, by the way; she’d wanted each of us to pick one of these schools of thought we’d been learning about and make it “our” school of thought. She wanted us to grab the a hammer, or a screwdriver, or a spanner, and carry that with us for the rest of our lives. She somehow didn’t expect me to pack a toolbox.
My point is: Like OP said, sometimes the tool you need is a hammer. Sometimes you need a screwdriver. Sometimes you can make a hammer work where what you need is a screwdriver, but you’re going to end up stripping the screw; sometimes you can use a screwdriver in place of a hammer, but it’s going to take a lot more effort and brute force and you risk breaking the screwdriver. Sometimes you need a wrench and trying to use a hammer or screwdriver is going to make you declare that the bolt is problematic and should never be used by anyone. Sometimes what you really need is a hand saw, and trying to use any of the others...well, you can, but it’s going to make a mess and you might not be able to salvage the pieces left over.
These skills aren’t being taught in school anymore and you can see it in the way high school aged kids act about media and stuff.
They wouldn’t survive something like Lolita because I swear they’re being taught to turn their brains OFF and be spoon fed all their thoughts by someone else.
It’s really creepy.
I promise these skills are taught in school. I'm an English teacher. In a school. Who teaches them.
Now, Lolita is generally reserved for college classes. But a lot of the rationale behind continuing to teach the "classics" in high school (beyond the belief that a shared literary foundation promotes a better understanding of allusions and references) is that a lot of the classics are built on these kinds of complex readings and unreliable narrators and using historical and cultural context helps in their analysis. (I do think that we should be incorporating more diverse and modern lit into these classes, please understand)
Do all schools or individual teachers do this *well*? No, of course not. Do all students always really apply themselves to the development of deep critical thinking skills when their teacher pulls out A Tale of Two Cities? Also no.
But this isnt a "public school is failing / evil " problem. Being able to engage in multiple forms and styles of analysis is a really high level skill, and my post was just about how a very common one doesnt always work well with different kinds of stories.
OP, why do you describe analyzing Sailor Moon in a different way than (you assume) the author intended as "hemming and hawing?" I would argue there's a lot of value in approaching texts at a different angle.
Because ignoring context, tone, and intent when analyzing media is going to lead to conclusions are aren't consistently supported by the text you are looking at.
"Usagi is a villain because she's a queen and I think absolute monarchy is bad" ignores the way that Usagi, the moon kingdom, and basically all aspects of the lore are actually framed within the story. None of the characters' actions or motivations make consistent sense if we start from the assumptions that "Usagi = monarchist=evil" and it would cause you to over look all the themes and interpretations that DO make consistent sense.
At some point you have to take a work at face value and see what it is trying to say.
Is the breakdown of monarchy actually relevant to the themes and messages presented in Sailor Moon? No, not really.
So focusing on the Moon Kingdom monarchy and the ethics there of is sort of... besides the point. The Moon Kingdom is a fairy tale, not a reflection of reality.
I’m not actually interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom, you know?
Now, is it *cool* to look at works in various ways? Sure! Are some people interested in the tax policy of the Moon Kingdom and want to explore what that would look like? Sure! And honestly if you want to explore the ramifications of idyllic fairy tale monarchies on the real world, then that’s really cool too!
But if you are looking at a work to understand what it is trying to say with the text itself, then you need to take some of its premises at face value. Usagi and the Sailor Scouts being the Good Guys is one of those premises.
And really the “Usagi is secretly a princess from the moon” is just a part of the escapist fantasy for most little kids watching more than it has anything to do with actual themes of monarchy.
There is a lot of value in being able to look at a text from various angles. And it’s perfectly okay to use a text and concept as a jumping off point for other explorations.
But the problem comes when people say that Usagi was definitively a villain in Sailor Moon, or that say Steven Universe with themes of family and conflict resolution is excusing genocide by not destroying the Diamonds. It misses the point of the fantasy. It misses the important themes, the lessons and point of the show to look at it like that.
Basically: reinterpretations are cool, but you gotta know how to take a work on its own premises too.
Exactly. Like, magical princess that shows how monarchies (or the idea of princesses in general) is broken or toxic? Utena and Star vs The Forces of Evil are right there.
The idea of a cute talking cat granting girls magical powers to turn them into warriors against evil and getting them killed being evil? Not a good take on Luna, but Kyuubei in Madoka? Exactly this. That's like, the point of Kyuubei- to riff on the trope that Luna, and Kero, and Mokona represent.
Media can raise all sorts of interesting conversations and discussions and ideas. But there's a very real difference between trying to awkwardly force those readings on a work where the tone and framing and context don't support it and acting like the media is actually supporting those messages, and using those ideas to explore it in a different work or to analyze the trope across the genre more broadly.
Moral and pure does not a protagonist make, and fandom is rife with that exclusive interpretation of storytelling. OP makes really good points; this thread is one of the best analyses I've read about lit crit on this site lately.
Stories aren't made in a vacuum-- every trope/theme/character archetype comes from somewhere and (general) you do yourself a disservice by viewing everything as whether it's morally uncorrupted or not.
“Protagonist” only means “the main character who the story follows,” not “the good guy.” The “antagonist” is “the character who opposes the protagonist’s completion of their goal,” not “the bad guy.”
I had a student once complain that the main relationship portrayed in Bernhard Schlink's Der Vorleser was problematic. They complained that the 15 year old protagonist was dating a woman in her 30s, and that the book never criticises the large power imbalance of the couple outright.
The thing is that to engage with the book you first need to understand that Der Vorleser tackles incredibly complex topics surrounding the German concept of Vergangenheitsbewältigung: learning to deal with the transgeneracional guilt and remorse that stems from the Holocaust, Nazism, and their war crimes. Der Vorleser is about the struggle of Germans and about what German culture and literature can even be after the Holocaust, it's about asking what a culturally German identity can even look like after the irreversible damage of Nazism, it's about dealing with the knowledge that maybe your grandparents were active participants in the machine of Nazism and genocide, it's about coping with the guilt of that past even if your family were never direct perpetrators, it's about understanding the different ways in which this remorse manifests for younger and older generations, it's about learning to accept and digest horrific historical events that are closer than people would like to think, it's about asking difficult questions about literacy, intellectualism, and Enlightenment values and how they relate to the Nazi rise to power, it's about a 15 year old boy in love with literature who's just learning about the world falling in love with an abusive and traumatized illiterate 30 year old woman who worked for the Nazis.
Der Vorleser is deep, and complex, and it purposefully wants you to engage with it critically. It needs you to ask complicated philosophical questions for which it does not necessarily provide clear answers.
If your criticism stops at taking the unreliable narrator's view of that problematic relationship at face value because the text never outwardly states "this is bad"... then you are not engaging with the work critically or intellectually.
Technically true.
He got the job.
He takes his job seriously.
I fuckin’ love this comic. Makes me smile like crazy every time it pops up.
I wonder if the Wolf Hunter thought he was going to a farm that grew elves.