scone butch

this post is like 11 years old

hey

"Deconstruction" does not (necessarily) mean "Adding a bunch of sex and violence and drug use and suicide to a work to make it grimdark"; it means, essentially, "foregrounding the implicit contradictions in a work by making them explicit in the text to showcase and critique their ideology in the wider culture."

So, for example "Watchmen" was deconstructive because superhero comics up to that point had, by and large, not really interrogated their own role with respect to things like the military-industrial complex or the rather sordid real-life history of vigilantism in the United States or the sexual psychology of an individual dressing up in (essentially) bondage gear and going out to beat people up on the street. The sex and the violence serve a thematic purpose. It doesn't become more deconstructive by adding *more* sex and violence to it; it depends on what was in (or left out of) the original work.

Tobias is the central tragic figure of the animorphs, even if he doesn't get as many books. He's literally so chosen one coded. He's a suicidal trans bird. He's full of hope for humanity. He is deeply alienated from his own humanity. He survived abuse and neglect. His dad's a fucking alien prince. He saved a different alien species from extinction, and became the namesake of their first free leader in like, three generations. God talks to him personally and doesn't do anything that he wants. He's the most character of all time. He's just like me for real. No one is doing it like him.

And Rachel!!!! Girl has the best character arc of the entire book series (outside the Hork Bajir Chronicles but I digress). She's a princess. She's a monster. She's the pretty one. She beat a man to death with her own severed arm. She sacrificed herself for humanity. She self-destructively followed orders to her own demise. She almost gave up her human life and became a cat forever just to comfort a crying friend. She's Satan's most specialist favorite teenager. And she was a Packard Award winning student to boot!

But together, they form the messiest, most dysfunctional situationship that any middle schooler ever read about. They love each other. They flirt with other people (or birds). Rachel cared about Tobias when everyone else thought he was some weirdo who would never amount to anything. She also wants him to stop living as his authentic self because it's inconvenient to her. Tobias thinks that Rachel is the most beautiful creature ever to grace the earth. He also enables her most self-destructive tendencies and romanticizes her for being the monster she doesn't want to become. He knows that she loves him no matter what. He was mortified that she saw him eating roadkill, and fears her judgement like death itself. She celebrates his birthday with him, even though he forgot when his birthday even was. She also, and I cannot stress this enough, thinks that he should leave the fight that gives him his only living purpose and stop living in the body that he's chosen for himself because she doesn't know how to be a bird's girlfriend (and like, fair. Not a normal situation tbh). They are doomed by the narrative. Together ❤️

“Eccentric Jester” © London Workman, accessed at their ArtStation here

[This is one of many iterations of my “goth clown” persona, tailored to a low level game and with more emphasis on the clown. I created her for a freeform game run by @abominationimperatrix​, which we haven’t gone back to yet. I do hope to. The Harley Quinn influence is very much intentional.]

Mad Maddy Maddison CR 3 CG Humanoid (dark folk) Clad in mismatched and brightly colored jester’s motley, this tiny woman is thin, muscular and pretty. At first glance she might appear to be wearing stage makeup, but her gray skin and black lips are their natural color.

Mad Maddy Maddison has had a very complicated and strange life already in her nineteen years, and is excited to see what happens next. She was born to a clan of dark folk living in the Darklands beneath the Brazen Peaks, and the caligni callers selected for her to be a dancer, one of the dark folk who act as intermediaries between settlements. Unfortunately, that meant that her wanderlust started at a very early age, and she managed to get separated from her family. She was found and given a home, but unfortunately it was by Mater Cachinnarum, the Mother of Sneers. This wicked bogeywoman pops up in nightmares throughout eastern Garund, and tried to raise Maddy to do the same. Even though Maddy was raised by Cachinnarum for a solid decade, she held true to her overall sense of kindness and good humor, and escaped by the grace of Cayden Cailean, who has a soft spot for all orphans and runaways.

Maddy made it to the bustling city of Katapesh where she currently works at the Night Circus, an entertainment troupe in the Night Markets. At the Circus, she is a talented juggler, percussionist, clown and occasional pickpocket. Her favored instruments are the zills. Maddy has a fascination with death and the undead, having been surrounded by ghouls and skeletons in Mater Cachinnarum’s care, and she is learning how to affect them with her magical music. She’s also working on making friends, something she’s never had a lot of. Her closest friend is a flumph named Taktii, who has given dire warnings about monsters in space. Maddy currently finds this concept more intriguing than scary.

Maddy stands a whole two and a half feet tall and carries a club as long as she is tall. She has a caffeine addiction, and rarely goes a day without several cups of coffee.