Living and Learning Everyday

protagonists were kind of forced into a flat dichotomy of 'active' (takes actions to further their own goals, thus driving the story) and 'passive' (is acted upon by events beyond their control, moving them through the plot) with 'active' being considered good and passive being considered bad

I think this framework is very locked within a certain cultural viewpoint... specifically of a 20th century western white male. For one thing it assumes a "protagonist" will have a certain level of agency, to have goals and pursue them, overcoming obstacles in the way. It is not very inclusive of characters that don't have much agency.

It also assumes that desire/want = orienting toward or pursuing.

As far as I am concerned, characters don't have goals. They CAN, but these goals aren't actually the functional gears of the plot, and are instead their conscious rationalizations of what's really running the show.

Rather, characters have instincts and drives. I don't like to say "desires" because desire suggests something that is explicit, a thing that the character can attribute their feelings to.

I realized when reading Shakespeare's Othello that interesting characters often can't be understood in terms of "goals" or "desires" because they don't understand what they want or why they want that and they constantly act in ways that are contradictory to what they want or think they want. What a character consciously thinks is a whole layer on top of their actual instincts and feelings, which are primal and buried in traumas and needs and other aspects of creaturehood, and often is a fiction to resolve contradictions and dissonance in the demands of the creature-self. some characters can reflect upon their own thought processes and some cannot.

The best ones have advice on decor, how to select high-quality furniture, childrearing, fashion, etc--from a contemporary perspective, and the things the authors feel the need to clarify vs the wild shit that will just casually mention like it's something everyone knows and agrees on is REALLY revealing of the culture and how it's shifted.

And while a lot of the advice is WILDLY bigoted or just outright funny, you'd be surprised how much of it is...just genuinely timeless, and shockingly compassionate.

They ALSO, as a writer, have INVALUABLE resources--because, again, they're talking about things that are so MUNDANE that a lot of the time nobody really sat down to formally document what normal, everyday people thought or cared about--because that's boring! But a book written to provide advice and information to, say, a young woman who's never run her own home before? You can fully expect an entire chapter dedicated to The Types Of Oven, and which features are useful and worth spending money on, and which features are a huge hassle to clean and a waste of space, and what to spend that money on instead.

And like. As a writer who frequently works in the 1800s? Fuck inflation calculators, this is the kind of thing I need. This is absolutely priceless.

Now that being said.

My current favorite 'etiquette guide' in the world is actually like....70% purely practical advice, written by a gentleman the groupchat has affectionately dubbed History's Most Autistic Man In The World, and thank god they didn't have Aderall back then

Because the AuDHD is strong in this one and as a result, in addition to the deeply practical and useful everyday reference points, we also have:

because bitter almonds have cyanide in them that you have to cook them to get rid of, and are consequently illegal in the united states. so it's very common nowadays for people (americans) to take the 'bitter almond' smell of cyanide to mean 'almonds that have gone bad' or 'almonds but bitter.'

Still one of the best animations I've ever done. Took just under a week and was equal parts fun and challenging. So here are some process passes! The full version had too many colors so I had to do some compression T0T