♡ aztro ♡

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@desk-drawerr thank you for giving us this creature

he's lagging my tumblr so now he's you're guys problem too

i accidently added star walker but oh well he's a duck now

Okay, this one is getting the tags. I think it's important. Spread it around if you're so kind.

I've noticed that there has, throughout history, been an ever-changing term for 'art I like but feel a little bit bad about liking so much.' You know, terms like 'guilty pleasure,' 'slop,' etc. We enjoy them, but we use these terms that have intrinsically negative connotations when describing them, as if trying to preemptively acknowledge their flaws lest we be ridiculed for ignoring them.

Stop it. Cut it out.

Like so many things, that collective cultural guilt has its roots in classism and racism and it's wrong and I'm tired of it. It's part of the long-standing separation between so-called 'high art' and the mire of everything else implied to be 'low art.' And while I can't solve those deep-rooted cultural issues (or at least if I can, no one has told me how) as a professional author I'd like to propose something to salve them with my preferred weapon: words. 

(Quick credentials blast: I've written eleven books across four series over the course of the last five years. Writing is my full-time job and I hear I'm at least decent enough at it to make a very comfortable living, for whatever questionable worth that has as a measure of skill. I care a lot about art and think a lot about art. Okay, we good? Good.)

First, it is important to acknowledge that the distinction between high art and low art has not persisted exclusively through the dark, evil will of the Mystical Cabal of Nebulously-Defined Bigots. The phrasing persists because it does actually touch on a very relevant difference between what I think most people intuitively understand as the two major types of art, particularly (but not exclusively) in longform media, i.e., TV shows, movies, video games, books, etc. Traditionally, 'high art' has an ephemerally different feel to it. It makes you think about things. It makes you have to wrangle with your own emotions. It makes you cry, or wonder, or do one of several other rather exhausting but rewarding mental activities. Meanwhile, 'low art' is just… fun. It's nice. It's funny. It's entertaining. It could not more obviously still be art, but it's… different. It doesn't move you on a deep level, and it was never trying to. If anything, it's a nice way to keep comfortably still.

AND THAT'S FINE, ACTUALLY. That's okay. It is, I would in fact argue, essential to the human experience and human society as a whole! News flash: people need to relax sometimes. Crazy idea, I know. We don't have to pretend it's somehow intrinsically low-brow to enjoy an action movie or laugh at a comedy sketch. That is a wretched thing to do to our own culture.

So that's where the alternative names I've been cooking come in: relaxation and revelation. I do think, as someone who likes to focus on the latter where possible, that both are immeasurably important. Art, when created for revelation, has immense potential to move and change a person. It is a teaching tool, it is an outlet for pain, it is a way to feel seen and understood and loved in a wide and often horrible universe. Much of my worldview has been fundamentally altered for the better thanks to transformative works of art, and they are so, so, so important to society and good for humans in general. All of that just… isn't a good reason to get weird and gatekeepy about it.

Because again, relaxation is also important. I imagine a hypothetically healthy person (I've never met one and I doubt you have either but thankfully that doesn't stop us from using them as a reference somehow) would take time to enjoy quite a bit of both. And all art (again, especially longform art) has elements of both, because it's all very subjective! A piece of revelatory art that is making a point about something you've already internalized and understood isn't going to rock your world, but it might be entertaining. And likewise, while I would be mildly concerned for you if you walked out of, say, Michael Bay's Transformers with a fundamentally altered outlook on life, my horror does not make your revelation any less valid. This is something I think we should work to internalize as a culture, and the first step for that is to stop using negative-connotated language about our own entertainment.

the horror of being Different in suburbia, in a social landscape in which those around you are oh so willing to deny differences and stay content to live cookie cutter lives. the escape into TV, into movies, into media that portrays life as more, that gives its protagonists meaning beyond monotony, and the innate longing in your chest to be them when you're you. the dissociation as time flies by, minutes to hours to days to months to years, when you barely feel like seconds are passing. the isolation of being yourself in a place where no one feels like themselves.

the people around you are complacent. they do not care about you if you are Different, because Different breaks their brains. you can apologize seventy times to everyone who's crossed your path, but it does not change that Difference, and it doesn't change the growing wound in your chest, sending pain through you with each step and each misspoken apology. your family might care about you but your father will bathe away your attempt to escape and it will crush the soul from you as you scream the truth. your coworkers will do nothing but watch you drown in it. and the only person who understands you in your small town has left because they understand they must die, one way or another, and they want violent, garish rebirth over the slow decay you condemn yourself to.

to me, it's an embodiment of how i grew up distanced from my own body and mind, from what made me Different, burying it inside me to survive, and the way i must crawl from my grave, the way I must accept the death of what that burial meant and the way I must accept what comes out the grave. the grief and the viscera and the slime thst oozes out of me, the dangers that come with what I do, what all of us must do when we're so distanced from ourselves we must revert to daydreaming about characters in TV shows instead of planning our futures.