jester 4 jester

"i ate too many cookies" is truly an ageless problem. an unlearnable lesson.

i think theres this idea in the general public that the "best" fanfic gets turned into real books like 50 shades of grey. but the truth is that the best fanfic can never be published as an actual book because its intricately woven into the canon material so its inseparable even if you change the names

wearing a shirt that says “even in an au fanfiction, the characters, relationships, or even the scenarios are recognizable in the best fanfic, and an au without ties to the source material may be a fine story but it’s not a good fanfiction” and booty shorts that say “I HATE FUN”

met a woman today whose original real actual given-at-birth first name is "Vendetta." ma'am are you aware you are a videogame protagonist and/or a character in a skullduggery pleasant novel. real quick sorry to bother you miss but who exactly were your parents expecting you to avenge in their name

the worst part is I can't dare ask her that last question because then she might say something like "You don't remember, do you?" and pull out a katana and obviously I'm not stupid enough to take that risk

[ID: Intricate stained glass windows depicting Duck Team and their serpents. The serpents chain together and break the borders of the windows, connecting them. First is Calder, a frost giant knight in blue armor with an antlered helm. He's holding an icy sword aloft. Honeysuckle, a bronze serpent with frosty scales and sharp teeth, coils around him. Calder's sigil, a sword through an icicle, is in the peak of the window. Next is Callie, an eladrin with gray armor and long watery hair. She's holding a shell-covered spear. Foster, a white duck with red eyes, is at her side, and Marigold, a golden serpent with crackling breath, coils behind her. Her sigil, a stormcloud with a sun, is at the peak of her window. Last is Sol, a green bullywug wearing a tracksuit and a scarf. He has heavy gauntlets around his fists, raising one, and mushrooms sprout from his neck and back. Licorice, a silvery serpent with mushrooms sprouting from their scales, is coiled behind him. Sol's sigil, a frog with a frog-foot-like crown, is at the peak of his window. Each of the sigils in the windows match the eyes of their serpents: Calder + Honeysuckle's is blue, Callie+Marigold's red, and Sol+Licorice's yellow.]

it’s a pretty well-known phenomenon that you only get a couple seconds with your horror creature fully visible onscreen before it gets “chuckied,” a term coined by yours truly referring to the shift between the first and second acts of child’s play (1988) as the audience gets used to seeing the little chucky puppet moving around and consequently can no longer buy into the film’s serious slasher tone in the absence of the horror of the unknown. the tuunbaq in the terror and the dogomorph in alien 3 (1992) are also famous victims of chuckying—just like how lovecraftian horror usually falls flat on the screen, too much visibility and your scary, amorphous creature will become a very morphous puppet or cgi’d in picture. the easiest way to combat this is of course to keep the creature obscured for as much of the piece as possible; for instance, despite their oppressive presence throughout their respective works, the beast in over the garden wall is shown for less than six frames and the eponymous kaiju of cloverfield (2008) is never properly shown, allowing each to retain their mystery and danger. another route is to simply lean into the campiness of it, like the later child’s play franchise and alien resurrection (1997). in the case of the blob (1958) a mere satirical title sequence song is enough to completely transform a fairly standard creature feature into an enduring masterpiece of hokey fun. the third option to combat chuckying is for the horror creature to constantly transform—the thing (1982), the fly (1986), and aliens (1986) show their creatures in loving detail, but there is always something the audience hasn’t seen yet, something they don’t know to brace themselves for. it’s a fine line to walk, of course, but that’s the nature of the game when you want to turn the concept of the unknown into something knowable enough to bite you