Expecting Lovell To Be A Normal Regular Magic School Mentor Character Like

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

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deeply unlikeable and unpleasant female characters are actually so important for the ecosystem and also as a good litmus test over if a person is Weird about women or not

“The Things I Do For Love” / Bran’s Dream

Based on A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

2015 vs. 2017 Passing of the Elves With different style, and more vivid color :’3

soooo, on a vacation trip a week ago, I stumbled over @xiranjayzhao's Iron Widow in a book shop in Copenhagen and devoured it last weekend. It was quite the fun read. (And I am not that inclined to mechs 😄 but the rage filled female power fantasy and the setting felt rather refreshing to me) And after finishing the book I had to get at least some art out of my system. As usual it didn't end up what I really intended it to be in my head initially, but also, as usual it has to suffice for now or I'll never post it.

me: sees an absolutely outrageous costume me: ok but what if Fitz wore -

“we shall take everything they do to us and make it something else”

my somewhat unpopular opinion is that "famous story retold from female character's pov" is a good concept, actually. it's just that it became gimmicky very fast and spawned a storm of lazy works that refuse to engage with the source material in any meaningful way and flanderize everything into generic YA tropes. but at its core taking a known story and exploring it through the perspective of a female character even, and perhaps especially, when said character is not a particularly active agent on said story, is a way to remind people that women are still people with rich inner lives and that the real life women that we learned to think as pawns in the lives of men were/are still humans whose complex interiority deserve exploration on principle that everyone, but especially the people who live on the margins, deserve exploration. but that's a concept that gets defeated when most people writing those lazy retellings can't write complex interiority to save their lives.

What r Joyce’s thoughts on the rangers (also hi love ur poasts and J is sooo fun)

hi ! you’re so kind !! here we go.

herald. dumbass kid. joyce is nice to his face, playing into his dream narrative of a kindly, washed-up-but-still-got-it sidestep who trains him and even teases that she might get back into the hero game … while destroying his self-confidence on purpose. she pities & despises him, seeing him as a poster boy for letting the agencies & corporations that own heroes do whatever they want with you, willingly and happily, til you die or your parts are wearing out too fast to be worth the replacement cost. she’s not interested in seeing more complexity in him.

short term, breaking down herald is just the most efficient way to break down the rangers as a team, embarrass them on tv, make the public question why they’re reliant on such fallible heroes so blackout can give answers. long term, if her “training” takes herald out of the hero game now while he’s young and undamaged, before she unveils the system of abuse & vice behind it, well. she thinks he’ll come to thank her for the favor.

argent. threat, but not too hard to neutralize. joyce successfully plays the harmless therapist to plant false memories & the damocles sword. blackout comes out of their book 1 fights unscathed & not flagged as a telepath, their book 2 fight just dinged up. joyce is curious about argent’s motives, her apparent attraction to blackout, the source of her powers, her dynamic with the other rangers, but not enough to ever chase the rabbit while she’s on a mission, so she knows almost nothing about her.

chen. one of a very few ppl joyce shows some of her real personality to—mainly, the pissy part. they can’t help snipping at each other like a couple of mean old queens whenever they’re in a room. but it leaves them both tired, and sad, because even though they don’t see eye to eye at least they see each other, more than they do with many other people. which is why he’s the only one with any suspicion she might be blackout (25%). he’d be the second person she told about being a re-gene, if she was sure he wouldn’t kill her.

ortega. jesus christ, what doesn’t joyce think about ortega? sidestep loved him. she’s remembered as his sidekick. she resents that, deeply, because it implies that as soon as she got away from her creators she immediately poured herself into someone else’s shape instead of molding her own identity, and she thinks that might be true. joyce still loves him. she hit him with a car. she crashed a car with him in it. she likes how he looks with blood on his face. she hates to see him hurt.

she flirted with him as her puppet, josie, a younger woman who looks like sidestep, or maybe her daughter, while also flirting with him as herself. she turned him down when he asked joyce to the gala, accepted as josie, only to stop in front of the sidestep exhibit and throw a hissy fit about how “she” saw him talking with an older woman, and should she be worried? then as joyce demanded to know if him going out with josie was trading in for the younger model. only when she was confident he liked her real body more did she have josie break things off, pretending to be scared of his powers as a parting kick in the ribs for “making” her doubt. he hadn’t done anything.

she slept with him. she showed him her tattoos. she smacked him. she kissed him again. she cut her hair back to how she wore it when she was sidestep. she misses his mom.

she’s in on his hollow ground investigation, uncertain yet whether to help him or tangle up all his red strings while he’s distracted. she’s testing him, encouraging him to share his conspiracy theories, trying to see if he’s jaded or desperate enough to partner with blackout in exposing the truth. she wants him to be. she wants to be honest with him and she wants his sharp, suspicious mind. but she doesn’t want to see him brought low enough to get on her level, because she fell in love with an idealist. he calls her joy. it’s so. 🤌

well thanks for asking