akasha was right

You are the only other Armand fan that I trust.

armand's treatment of claudia really stuck out to me on my rewatch of the first two seasons before tvl was released. he's straight up sadistic, knows full well what he's doing, and knows he has the power to do so with minimal consequence. the coven might've stacked the deck for her death, but the cruelty on his part was voluntary in service of his own catharsis

i don't think anne had anything to do with them, but i remember seeing them around and they do indeed look cool as fuck 😭

i promise i'm not ignoring these anons y'all 😭

disregard everything everybody (including me) says about them if you plan on reading tva or all of tvc eventually. it's imperative that u wipe your brain of the discourse men in black style

Same! I've heard "all fiction isn't meant to be didactic" and "depiction doesn't equal endorsement," and other similar sentiments, used as an alternative, which is good, because fiction does affect reality. I've seen people who see themselves as too smart and media literate to fall for propaganda and that is 😬

But like you said, I can totally understand people just saying "fiction doesn't affect reality" when someone is being ridiculous. I've seen people accuse actors of being racist over something their character did 🫩

btw, if you have any nonfiction book recs on this particular subject, lmk!

braiding sweetgrass by robin wall kimmerer, if you haven't already read it, is my go-to recommendation for this.

i watched a video recently, i don't remember what it was called, but it got me thinking about the phenomena of suicide clusters, and the relative increase in youth suicides in the months following the release of 13 reasons why on netflix. i never watched the show myself but i remember the experience of its popularity pretty well and i did see the infamous, now-removed scene. when i went looking for data on the subject because i wanted to get an idea of what the NAASP's recommendations for depictions of suicide were based on, i found the completely predictable consensus to be that it's difficult to reliably attribute suicide, individually or in aggregate, to a singular casual factor.

I've also noticed that show!Armand fans tend to identify with the character way too strongly. I've found so many posts across social media of fans talking about Armand as if they are Armand ("the show is mocking my trauma" said literally). It reminds me of that post about people saying they don't read stories in third-person because they can't identify with the character and saying they dropped books when the first-person narrator did things they wouldn't do.

I don't want to say this because the term has been abused and overused, but what in the media illiteracy is going on.

and this is where people are losing the plot. fiction can be an outlet for wish fulfillment. there's nothing wrong with creating or desiring that, but there is a problem if that's the only way you're willing to interact with stories, and subsequently demand that your pursuit of that be valued equally to critical examination of themes, authorial intent, technical quality, etc.

i'm also not in the camp of "fiction doesn't affect reality", but i understand why people say it in situations where the opposing party is being obviously ridiculous. i'm really passionate about the effects of storytelling on the evolutionary development of human beings, so i get a little pedantic about that statement in particular.