i don’t know what’s going on anymore

1. you go full-throated modernist and say “and then nothing the protagonists did actually mattered because we are all crushed into paste beneath the vast unfeeling gears of capitalism” (YES that is modernism and NOT postmodernism because we are LAMENTING the powerlessness, that the center cannot hold, that the individual facing the institution is like the romantic cavalry charge facing the rip of a maxim gun behind barbed wire).

2. the protagonists aren’t able to fix the world but they are able to chip away at some part of a larger, more intractable problem (if you portray this as a good thing then online communists everywhere will call you a neoliberal bootlicker and publicly fantasize about your violent death. If you don’t portray this as a good thing then everyone on bluesky will send you their Aaron Sorkin monologues. both outcomes are equally obnoxious and miserable)

3. your protagonists are so good at understanding the assignment that everyone just needs to give them total power to reshape the world and then they fix everything (you just did the CEO-of-racism thing with extra steps)

One might even make the case that the conventions of storytelling itself push back against most attempts to address and discuss structural problems. And if one really wanted to, one could make the case that this means the act of storytelling is in and of itself regressive and reactionary: ‘protagonist’ is merely the modern signifier of the proverbial Good King whose ill treatment by the Bad Boyars (antagonists) both excuses his abuse of authority while justifying his desire for even more authority.

shen qingqiu will never be explaining everything, in the same way everyone will never just.

this goes for both shen qingqius, even! you could provoke them into 'saying something revealing' on certain topics. you could maybe get a deeply illuminating rant, if you set it up right, especially with our man mk 2 who likes to tell people why they're wrong. you could even draw information out of them, to some extent, if you gave the other characters somewhere to start and a reason to dig.

but they will never, ever sit down and convey their perspective and feelings in detail at length. that isn't going to happen. you are not going to get the other characters having our audience perspective on these guys via them communicating. they won't do it! they cannot do it.

even if they wanted to expose themselves to being known like that, which they certainly do not and would never, neither of them is capable of articulating their feelings on that level.

"because of The Curse?"

Trying to parse whether this reblog is making:

An extremely inaccurate assumption about how widespread witch trials were in the early modern period

An extremely specific point about the prevalence of different execution methods (most accused witches in Britain were hanged, not burnt)

examples: