a permanent blur in the corner of your eye

Risencrantz and Grindenstern

guy who's stuck in a timeloop for so long he stops wanting to leave it. guy who started out trying to escape but slowly grew used to and became comforted by the familiarity of the repeating day. guy who is no longer who he was before the timeloop. guy who is offered a way out and violently refuses it because he can't leave, doesn't want to leave. guy who escapes the timeloop by chance or force or accident and doesn't know how to live anymore. guy who keeps going through motions that don't match the situation and keeps having conversations that aren't actually occurring. guy who panics every time he realizes he can't predict the next instant. guy who left the timeloop but still lives with it.

Official Time Loop Post

What if all I ever wanted to do was make you happy but I kept forgetting who you were and who I was and who we both were to each other but never how much I cared about you, and you knew so much more about the world than I did and you were frustrated by how much I kept forgetting but you stayed with me anyway, because we’re Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, travelling companions… or was it Guildenstern and Rosencrantz? And then we died and it didn’t mean anything because it’s all going to happen again now so toss the coin and we’ll both pretend to be shocked when it lands on heads for the 76th time in a row.

i decided all plays are time loops btw. it’s true because they keep getting performed over and over and over and the ending never changes and they can never escape it. if you even care.

thinking about characters who are fated to die. doomed from the start. no recourse. no fixing what's predestined. born dead or never born at all. killed by the narrative. trapped in the knots of the universe. caught in a loop that can never be undone. ugh they just scratch my brain

the fact that i'm no longer the same age as the protagonists of novels and films i once connected to is so heartbreaking. there was a time when I looked forward to turning their age. i did. and i also outgrew them. i continue to age, but they don't; never will. the immortality of fiction is beautiful, but cruel.

I love when fiction makes the audience feel guilty about their role as the audience. When something fucked up is treated as a joke but later it's recognised how fucked up it was and the audience feels guilty for finding it funny. When a character breaks the fourth wall to plead for help, and you can't do anything so you just watch. And you know that the characters pain isn't real, but they're begging for help and you're not helping because their suffering is entertainment for you

They should invent a tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow that doesn’t creep in this petty pace from day to day

There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said - no. But somehow we missed it. Well, we’ll do better next time. if u even care

thinking about rosencrantz & guildenstern are dead again. i think one thing about it is that it's such an excellent example of the sort of thing you can do in a fanfiction/transformative work that you can't really do in an original work? there is no R&G without the greater context of hamlet: hamlet both as a play and a wider cultural phenomenon. we know how these characters' stories will end, not just because we've read the title of the play, but because their ending has been etched into the literary consciousness. the tragedy extends beyond the bounds of either play and seems simultaneously more massive and more absurd because of it