The one and only ewe-nicorn!

Rewatching Treasure Planet (great movie, watch it) made realize something about the way that stories convey information to their audiences. There's been a lot of discussion on the overuse of plot twists and how many stories prioritise surprising their audience over telling decent stories. However, if you instead reveal the "twist" to the audience before it becomes known to the characters, you can build tension and stakes. Treasure Planet comes right out and tells you that Long John Silver is the main villain almost immediately after his introduction (And even before he's introduced we're warned about a cyborg, so you'd have to be pretty dense to not put 2 and 2 together and realize he's a bad guy). So when the audience watches him and Jim bond and grow closer, it builds tension for when Jim finds out and it highlights the tragedy of their friendship, because we all know it's not going to end well. Then, after the truth is revealed, stakes are created because we want the friendship between Jim and Silver to be repaired, because we know it was real, but we don't know if can be after what Silver's done. And all of this would have been lost if Silver's true nature had been a cheap plot twist. The tragedy would be completely overshadowed by the surprise and betrayal, and any investment in their relationship would have been built on the false impression that Silver was a good guy.

This is also why most adaptations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde don't follow the mystery plot structure of the original book, since everyone already knows they're the same person, no one will be surprised by that twist nowadays.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!” In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

yes, she’s hilarious, arguably one of the funniest characters in the game. but please never ever forget that queen deltarune is so very kind. when noelle stands up to her, instead of pushing things further, she backs down, acknowledges that her assumptions were incorrect, and tells her to instead choose the world that would make her happy. on the weird route, she doesn’t even go through with making her be her peon anymore, worried enough about her health to just make her rest instead. berdly annoys her, yes, but she still concernedly warns him that removing her plug will injure him if he tries to do it himself, still searches for him everywhere on the weird route. if you recruited nobody from cyber city, she seemingly tries to hide it, but she’s very obviously sad that none of her citizens are there to enjoy castle town with her. even some of her goofier bits, like her concern over the lightners being potassium deficient or their browser-search themed rooms, imply a degree of care for them on her part.

Today I wanted to talk about Marlow Trottie. Marlow was a 35 year old Black woman living in Louisiana, whose friends and family described as always having "a smile on her face" and as being "literally the sweetest person I’ve ever met!”, according to Them news' Quispe López.

i get why people are skeptical of claims about “rising antisemitism” in a world where a genocidal state is claiming everyone standing up to them is being antisemitic, but the reality is that the average person actually genuinely is being more antisemitic. every comment section on every single post i saw about Holocaust Remembrance Day was like this

because i'm a jewish anti-zionist i follow a lot of anti-zionist publications, a lot of activist orgs, and as a result i get pushed a ton of anti-zionist "content" on instagram-- 70% of it is influencers doing ragebait callouts of zionist israelis or posting responses to inflammatory comments, and of that, about 2/3 of it slides into antisemitic rhetoric and the comments are filled with antisemitic dogwhistles and even the classic "we need another holocaust" "hitler may have had a point" and so on

“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”