Nights act that way, I tell you.

“You are mine, beautiful boy”

Prints available here

CW: smoking, blood

Every year a bobcat mama gives birth to a litter of kittens on my roof. I set up a camera this time around. 

like. i think boring heterosexual women writing boring heterosexual romance novels with standard tropes is extremely 'normal' actually by any meaningful definition of the word. it is literally one of the most conventional, mainstream forms of publishing that exists. there's nothing 'weird' about it, or the people doing it, by any societal standard. what they mean to say is that those books and fanfictions are bad. (which, for what it's worth, i agree - they largely are bad.)

it invokes 'normality' as a moral framework while completely detaching it from its descriptive meaning. it's using these terms as pure value judgments to disguise what's essentially just taste-based criticism.

e.g there are a lot of posts that follow the general pattern of "are you normal about [xyz]". like "sure you say you support neurodivergent people but are you normal about autistic people who stim loudly in public. you say you support trans rights but are you normal about trans people who don't pass. you say you're a feminist but are you normal about fat women" etc etc etc. it's a common type of post; i've certainly shared similar posts before, but it's interesting, right, because ableism, transphobia, fatphobia are in fact exceedingly 'normal'. obviously everyone knows what is meant when someone says 'are you normal about [xyz]'; i'm not trying to be all 'um actually', about it, but it is very interesting that 'are you normal' gets used to mean, literally, 'are you moral'. much like how 'weird' and 'untalented' are used synonymously in the above post, 'weird' and 'immoral' become synonymous in this other context.

the sleight of hand here is in presenting 'normality' as a natural, obvious basis for determining both moral worth and artistic quality. people get to invoke the spectre of 'weirdness' as inherently problematic without ever having to defend why social conformity should be valued in the first place. when they say boring tropey published romance novels are written by 'weird' people (when by any meaningful definition of the word, they're not and in fact the best writers are usually freaks. stop insulting freaks' good name by comparing them to love hypothesis slop!!), they're reinforcing the unexamined premise that 'normality' is the proper standard for judging both people and their creative work.

Emma Stone on the set of Poor Things, 2024

Milly Alcock photographed by Nino Muñoz for Variety