"What we're engaged in is trying to distill whatever aspect of the human condition is appropriate for the story, and present it. I've always thought of acting as a kind of extra-dimensional anthropology. By which I mean we're in the business of people. People interest me: what motivates them; what inspires them and what makes them happy, what makes them sad. And we're all united by it, we're all united by it. We're all united by these feelings that we all feel at different times. The reason I became an actor is that I sat in the audience - in the cinema audience and also in audiences at the theatre, and I love it when you go to see something, and you enter as an individual and you leave as a group. Because you've all been bound together by the same experience."
Tom Hiddleston, on creating art
(Nerd HQ, SDCC 2013)
Cicero: would put multi-paragraph rants without page breaks and piss everyone off
Catullus: would run one of those arty blogs that periodically startles you with hardcore gay porn on your dash
Vergil: would have a successful ongoing webcomic or blog and would constantly reblog and be reblogged by Horace
Horace: would post a ton of Instagram photos of wine and houses in the countryside and would constantly reblog and be reblogged by Vergil
Pliny the Elder: would post a bunch of photos of flowers, nature, and astronomical facts, and would die while attempting to liveblog the Vesuvius eruption
Lucretius: would be a nightblogger who would always post stuff like “what if when we die we become atoms and float away in the wind? Like you could be inhaling and exhaling your dead ancestors right now!”
Ovid: Would post a mixture of porn and reblogs of nature and portrait photos and would ultimately engage in massive flame wars and get banned for violating the Terms of Service
If Ancient Greeks had Tumblrs
Plato would have an RPG blog, blogging as Socrates, and it would be one of those ones that’s practically all responses to asks, but the asks would be written by other RPG blogs that he was also running.
(Socrates would not be on Tumblr, he would be on Twitter, and would be more interested in stirring up drama over controversial issues than defending any one position himself.)
Thales would have a photo blog full of pictures of water: waterfalls, rivers, the sea. Heraclitus would sometimes reblog the river ones.
Heraclitus - total night-blogger. Reblogged by just about everyone, but for some reason no one ever remembers to reblog as text, so as you scroll down your feed all you ever see are fragments from linked posts.
Pythagoras - Posts a lot of gifs of cool natural phenomena followed by the comment: ‘MATHS!’. LOTS of followers, but tells a lot of in jokes you don’t really get if you haven’t been with him from the beginning.
Homer - just gets reblogged EVERYWHERE, frequently without a link to the source. Frequently accused of reposting stuff that’s actually his own work someone else has stolen.
Sophocles - very popular, writes a lot of fanfic. Into incest kinks. Big in Game of Thrones fandom.
Aristotle - follows Plato. Massive following extending onto other social networking platforms. Always a bit Serious. You will not find kittens being adorably incompetent here. Lot of meta about what blogging SHOULD be for.
Herodotus - lots of really interesting posts on history, the kind of stuff that really makes you go ‘huh, that’s cool’… not always particularly well researched.
If Renaissance Dramatists had Tumblr…
Jonson: endless Instagram photos of whatever he’s currently reading. Lots of followers who are mostly too intimidated to speak to him.
Shakespeare: writes tons of fanfiction, most of it AU. Gets a lot of anons complaining about his spelling, grammar, and (lack of) adherence to canon. All of them are Jonson.
Marlowe: veers wildly between giant flame wars over religion and/or gay rights and suddenly going on hiatus for weeks, only to return with a variety of bizarre and improbable stories. Runs a ‘secret’ side blog full of love poetry.
Beaumont and Fletcher: mostly just reblog Shakespeare- and their own weird injokes, even though they live in the same flat.
Dekker: posts a lot from the queue, but is hardly ever actually there because he never pays his internet bill and keeps getting cut off
Greene: hates everyone and everything and eventually ragequits after nobody agrees with his now-infamous rant about Shakespeare and Marlowe.
Nashe: trolls Marlowe’s inbox. Runs a ‘dick jokes’ blog with Shakespeare. Neither of them is ashamed of or sorry about it. They probably should be.
Middleton: instagrams random stuff in London and reblogs Financial Times articles with snarky commentary. Once in a while he reblogs something Shakespeare posted and it gets like a billion notes. Also Dekker posts on his account a lot when his internet is cut off.
Milton: posts incredibly wordy rants that confuse everyone because they’re both politically and religiously radical. Everyone reblogs them but nobody quite understands what they mean.
Spenser: mostly posts Mary Sue fanfic, but it’s beautifully written.
If you ever feel bad about your own writing, just remember that one of the world’s most well-known works of classic literature is self-insert fanfiction where the author hangs out with his favorite poet and is guided on his journey of discovery by a Manic Pixie Dream Girl version of a woman he met twice.
sometimes i think post-modernism looks remarkably like pre-modernism
During the act of reading engaging fiction, we can lose all sense of time. By the final chapter of the right book, we feel changed in our own lives, even if what we’ve read is entirely made up.
Research says that’s because while you’re engaged in fiction—unlike nonfiction—you’re given a safe arena to experience emotions without the need for self-protection. Since the events you’re reading about do not follow you into your own life, you can feel strong emotions freely.
[…]
The key metric the researchers used is “emotionally transported,” or how deeply connected we are to the story. Previous research has shown that when we read stories about people experiencing specific emotions or events it triggers activity in our brains as if we were right there in the thick of the action.
New study by Dutch researchers confirms previoustheories that reading fiction makes you a better person by expanding your capacity for empathy.
I would be interested in seeing a similar study done with other narrative media. Graphic novels, manga, and comic books, seem to follow the description of an empathic work that does not follow your life and allows you to experience the emotions of others.“ And it is still a reading experience. But I feel like taking it further into television and movies might be bordering on poor scholarship. By the same token, what of short stories? Short short stories? Flash fiction? Fan fiction drabbles? (For the purposes of fiction prose, a fan fiction that is 200k words would, I assume, be no different than original fiction of the same sort…)
I would be really interested to see this kind of work replicated with video games - particularly video games of different levels of linearity and plot. Does having your choices impacting the story change the level of empathy or immersion? In which direction? Certainly even a running around and chasing butterflies in skyrim or building houses in the Sims can make us "lose all sense of time,” but what of the claim of empathy?
I feel like the study almost demands to be done with different types of games, what with the claims out there in the news that video games cause the opposite of empathetic growth.
I just worry about researchers outside of the gaming community lumping something relatively freeform, or prized for its freeform play with a more story and character driven game.
I suppose I am similarly curious if the study found the increase in empathy for fiction to be true regardless of the material. Does Lolita and American Psycho produce the same increased empathic skills as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or even something more mainstream like Harry Potter?
If we are going to apply something designed for precision like the scientific method to something as vague and hand-wavy as “fiction” and “empathy” then we might as well go all the way, no?
So I was driving home and something occurred to me that I want to write about real fast, because i am apparently incapable of experiencing moments of learning and NOT sharing it here.
I have been, over time, fond of making jokes about Kieron Gillen killing off Kate Bishop. To me, it’s a joke about cavalierly spoiling another writer’s work and filling that writer’s inbox up with concerned emails and asks. I do this because I love Kieron. He’s one of my dearest friends in comics and out and I am on any given day at any given time in awe of something he’s said or written somewhere. And because Actually Feeling Stuff is hard this is how I show affection. Or at least it was.
For whatever reason I was chewing it over in my head and I started to feel like Lucy with the football. I dunno about you or who you are or what you like but I don’t like feeling like Lucy with the football.
It doesn’t matter what I thought the joke was, it occurs to me that because Kate is Kate and not, say, Karl, it occurs to me that there’s another angle from which to view that joke from that makes it seem… well, mean-spirited. Because this is a thing that comics does to Kates. Frequently.
Which, uh, which is bullshit. And I’m sorry for not sensing that sooner.
So I’m not going to make that joke any more. And I promise nobody’s gonna off Kate so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done.
Not right now, I mean. Not while she’s carrying that baby.
KIDDING! KIDDING!
Okay, that was the last joke like that. I promise.
For those who don’t know, Kate Bishop aka Hawkeye (not to be confused with Clint Barton aka Hawkeye aka Hawkguy) has been featured pretty prominently in two popular marvel titles. One of them is Hawkeye which Matt Fraction (the OP) writes, which is about Kate and Clint being Hawkeye and what that title and role means (and also about pizza dogs and adorable things) and the other is Young Avengers, written by Kieron Gillen, which is about a group of young super heroes (and gay love).
What Mr. Fraction is saying here that is so awesome and so wonderfully insightful into the medium he is writing in, is that the jokes he makes about Kate being killed off in the other series she is in are far too reminiscent of a real problem in comics - the killing off of women for the pain and motivation of men - as he puts it, “so Clint can feel bad about it and do what needs to be done.”
The next line is a lovely jab at both plot twists and conservative politics, because Mr. Fraction is a wonderful man.
Even if death in Marvel comics doesn’t mean much, the idea that female characters, and the violence enacted on them are tools to further the plot of male characters is a problem, and it is one that Mr. Fraction clearly understands.
It just makes me really happy when people show awareness of the problematic tropes of their medium, and vow to work against them. Also of course that Kate will be around for a while longer.
Episode 4 saw the words Bad Wolf appear for the first time. I just made it up on a whim, cos I liked the idea of the TARDIS being graffiti’d. But then I spent the rest of the episode idly wondering who that kid was, why he wrote those odd words. And, having dismissed notions of Evil Super Villain Kid, a plan began to form, in mid-production. Knowing that Rose would become the Time Goddess at the end of the series, I wondered if a Time Goddess would imprint herself on the universe, creating things in her image, like the face of Jesus in a bagel. Better still, these signs would actually summon her into existence. That’s the sort of thing you think about in this job, late at night. And then I worked backwards, inserting Bad Wolf references into almost every script. Funnily enough, I never told anyone what I was doing, in case it didn’t work, but the design department picked up on it—they didn’t even ask what it meant, they just offered to stencil it on Captain Jack’s bomb, in German. The idea spread without anyone knowing what it meant. Which is very Bad Wolf in itself.
Russell T Davies, Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts (via timelordsandladies)
“never use this word because it’s common, instead use all of these things that i’ll call synonyms even though they carry different connotations and will change the meaning of your dialogue if you use them” — very bad and unfortunately very common writing advice
fortunately, only on tumblr. Intro fiction/poetry day one basically says the opposite. Then they make you read enough Hemingway to long for ANYTHING ELSE.
Teen Wolf is often under fire around Tumblr for being as casually misogynistic as they come. The central women are all love interests or mothers. The female villains die horribly, where the male villains get backstories and development. Sometimes women seem to be gratuitously murdered just because. These accusations all may be true, but I think to call the show as a whole misogynistic is to miss one of the central themes of the show: matriarchy.
Teen Wolf, as far as I can tell, is about matriarchies. Specifically, it’s about matriarchy as an ideal and about the problems that arise when men grab for power that belongs by right to women. Which is to say, all the problems in the show.
This actually explains a lot. Everyone who’s raved about Frozen should read this.
Oh my god, this article. The writer of this article seems legit disappointed that the two mains of Frozen are not the Kate Beatonian “Strong Female Character.” While it doesn’t send me into belching globs of rage like I thought it might, I am tempted to waste the afternoon writing a strongly-worded rebuttal.
…but I won’t. Because today is sportsball.
Female characters that make mistakes = anti-feminist, ladies!
A good portion of what she writes is true about Frozen, but her strikes against it doesn’t have much to do with why I like that film. I like the film because, to me, it’s about escaping from your dumb well-intentioned-but-actually-friggin’-abusive biological parents and putting yourself in a place that you can heal. I don’t especially care if any other Disney movie managed to do that first. I like the way this movie did it, and it speaks to me and makes me feel stronger and less alone as a person.
Sometimes you just have to run away from everything, hide yourself in an ice castle, and learn that what you are isn’t terrible. Seeing this reinforced has made me a better, happier adult. The rest of the movie is just details.
Complaining that Elsa is a bad character because she doesn’t “take responsibility” both dramatically misses the point of her character arc completely and suggests to me a certain disturbing lack of empathy for people who actually deal with severe anxiety…
And saying that for Anna fixing her relationship with Elsa is a secondary goal because her second song is about love is… I mean… wow. Just. Wow.
Okay, kudos to everyone who got to the end of this piece of crap article. Wow.
This author, on top of whatever everyone else here said, clearly has no idea what theme and contrast are. What is Anna clumsy? because Elsa is too contained. They are contrasts. Duh? Like. What movie was this person watching?
Elsa doesn’t take responsibility? What - did she have to say those words on camera? Or does this author not know how to read emotion, motivation, or anything that isn’t stated.
And um. Love being Anna’s primary objective? Maybe this author was busy checking her watch when the conflict was resolved, what with the “true love” in the film being that between sisters.
But yeah, nothing outgrosses the fact that this author needs women to be perfect idealized “strong” characters with no flaws or actual traits.
Look at me, I am not a good female character (gender shit aside).
Oh, and the fact that they don’t think that showing that a male love interest can be predatory is important and a feminist message? Psh. John Smith was shown as nonpredatory. And Naveen, who came looking for money, ended up being a god guy after all.