Lilibet

And this is going to make a lot of people very angry to hear.

But a lot of y'all on this website are truly deeply genuinely never going to be capable of any kind of real narrative analysis--and I don't mean 'being right all the time' I mean 'meaningfully engaging with the text in any way'--

The match cuts were meticulously designed and put there to communicate something.

The VA's delivery of a line was being directed. Inflection and tone change the meaning of dialogue. This is intentional. There are entire teams of people shaping those choices and deciding which take to use based on what works best for the story.

Information is being revealed in a specific order, on purpose, to craft an emotional arc and guide the audience's understanding.

A character's romantic preferences are only, and SHOULD only be, their primary motivation if the genre is romance. That is why there is a genre called that. Most stories are other genres.

Creators who dislike a character generally give them LESS attention, MORE boring storylines, and LESS screentime.

Sometimes curtains are just blue. But if the shot composition or written narration takes time to HIGHLIGHT, especially more than once, that the curtains are blue, then the blueness of the curtains is by definition narratively important.

"Cite your sources" is not a witch's curse that banishes People With Different Opinions to the shadowrealm of Being Wrong. Someone making points that challenge your perceptions, while including screenshots and explicit examples, cannot be dismissed with "cite your sources" because they are literally doing that. Don't @ me on this one I've seen shit in the wars, y'all.

Failing to understand these things WILL bar you from ever really engaging with or understanding any narrative more complicated than Paw Patrol for the rest of your life.

OP: you guys are never going to be able to meaningfully engage with story and character analysis if you cant understand or aren't willing to even consider the context within writers create their stories and the intention behind characters actions and motivations, which are intentional and complex. Not everything begins and ends with romance and relationships, in fact most stories outside of the romance genre feature more complex themes and motivations than straightforward romance and romantic love. Sorry if that makes you mad.

.... you know I do think there may have been something more significant than romantic attraction motivating this character, who is a violent obsessive stalker. In fact, it could be something a little more... fatal?

In that new Takemiya Keiko fanbook, Saito Chiho said that when she read Kaze to ki no uta, she realized that Revolutionary Girl Utena was basically entirely based on it, just repackaged for the afternoon anime audience.

A boarding school closed off from the rest of the world.

A person who gets cruelly passed around among the powerful elite of the school – and secretly seems to enjoy this on some level.

Another person coming in from the outside to break this status quo and “save” the victim.

But was this “saving” what the victim wanted, or asked for, or needed?

My mind: blown.

“Disturbing, Traversing, Borderless, Shaking Sexuality: The Place where Revolutionary Girl Utena was Born”, translated here.

a few relevant pulls:

The biggest difference is that the victim manages to start healing from her traumas after breaking from her abuser and she gets her happy ending with the protagonist in the outside world, that’s correctly potrayed as imperfect and full of horrors and awful people but is also a place where there’s the hope of change and growth in the better direction, in “Revolutionary girl Utena”; while in “Kaze to ki no uta” the victim doesn’t manage to face his traumas and the outside world is as dark and hopeless as the school enviroment and it ends in tragedy.

Also, @iaiamothrafhtagn is right in pointing out how Ikuhara and Kotani note the racism of western slash fandom correctly and then they shrug at it since a lot of Western fiction is still influenced by old racist and colonialist ideas, hence why I’m happy about works from non-Western or Western minorities authors inspired by their cultures and histories or by Western authors who actually did their research and consulted reliable historians and people from the culture that their works are focused on, and Japan does have a huge problem of racism against foreigners and against the Ainu and the Ryukyuan people.

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

gosh I enjoy this website

There's worse to come, folks. Strap in and stay strapped.

I made one comment, and it was this:

I’m 33 now, and I still discover a new joke every time I reread it.

*starts thunderously knocking on the doors of heaven*

In the UK, the book of the peerage is called Burke’s Peerage. Burke sounds like berk, which means a silly/annoying person. So Terry took ‘twerp’, another word for a silly or annoying person, and replaced the e with u. 

Trans silvas very simply translated into german would be über den Wald

Trans silvas -> Transsilvanien -> Überwald

The Venturi Effect is a scientific term referring to the acceleration of a liquid through a narrow tube (like a jet).

Selachii is a classification of sharks. (I discovered this when my stepson got really into sharks)

The Malleus Maleficarum is a very real, very nasty and absolutely batshit insane book from late 15th-century Germany, basically laying out the procedure for catching, torturing, and executing witches. Its title translates to The Hammer of Witches. The other titles are Pratchett's inventions.

I made one comment, and it was this: