T.D. Cloud

🖤 BLURB REVEAL 🖤 Today's OUR CRIMSON CAGE blurb comes from one of my favorite dead dove yaoi creators, @tdcloud She gave me one of my claustrophobic vampire faves and a feelsbad Pied Piper retelling that you should read as well. OSSUARY is a hot descent into the graveyard underworld of the Paris catacombs. INFAUST is a journey through psychological torment with a mourning boy witch and the trickster he's trying to bring to heel. If you like monsters monstrous and books with "they end up together but it feels bad," give her work a read. We're less than a month out from OUR CRIMSON CAGE, pre-order today

(pdfs might take a smidge longer, apologies for the delay there)

And this is going to make a lot of people very angry to hear.

But a lot of y'all on this website are truly deeply genuinely never going to be capable of any kind of real narrative analysis--and I don't mean 'being right all the time' I mean 'meaningfully engaging with the text in any way'--

The match cuts were meticulously designed and put there to communicate something.

The VA's delivery of a line was being directed. Inflection and tone change the meaning of dialogue. This is intentional. There are entire teams of people shaping those choices and deciding which take to use based on what works best for the story.

Information is being revealed in a specific order, on purpose, to craft an emotional arc and guide the audience's understanding.

A character's romantic preferences are only, and SHOULD only be, their primary motivation if the genre is romance. That is why there is a genre called that. Most stories are other genres.

Creators who dislike a character generally give them LESS attention, MORE boring storylines, and LESS screentime.

Sometimes curtains are just blue. But if the shot composition or written narration takes time to HIGHLIGHT, especially more than once, that the curtains are blue, then the blueness of the curtains is by definition narratively important.

"Cite your sources" is not a witch's curse that banishes People With Different Opinions to the shadowrealm of Being Wrong. Someone making points that challenge your perceptions, while including screenshots and explicit examples, cannot be dismissed with "cite your sources" because they are literally doing that. Don't @ me on this one I've seen shit in the wars, y'all.

Failing to understand these things WILL bar you from ever really engaging with or understanding any narrative more complicated than Paw Patrol for the rest of your life.

🩸 BLURB REVEAL 🩸

I love the way Camilla Andrew writes complex women her work, always centering their pain and their strength while never coddling or excusing their worse instincts

If you enjoy reading about female rage, THE SANGUINE SORCERESS is an incredible exploration of female rage in a fantasy setting. A woman breaks free of her societal expectations to become the witch in the woods, and it really sets the tone for the rules of femininity and womanhood in that fantasy world at large. Highly, highly recommend The Essence of the Equinox trilogy as well for lush writing and complex, beautiful women.

OUR CRIMSON CAGE comes out August 11th and is up for eARC requests and preorders 🩸

Worldbuilding where being queer is normalized and queerphobia has no impact on the plot? THAT'S FINE. Worldbuilding that includes queerphobia and tackles the effects of it as part of the story? THAT'S ALSO FINE.

Low-stakes queer romcom where the characters are fluffy and cute? THAT'S COOL. Messy queer drama with toxic people who fuck each other over and clash repeatedly? THAT'S ALSO COOL.

Stories that center the characters' queerness, show a trans character's transition, and are about the queerness as much as the rest of the plot? AWESOME. Stories where the characters' queerness isn't treated as a big deal, and have trans characters whose transition happened before the story entirely? ALSO AWESOME.

You may PREFER one thing or another, but it is actually good to have all these things. It's about variety. It's about queer characters being allowed to exist without censorship. It's about queer artists getting to make things without being told we're a "niche issue" or "adult content." It's about having as many goddamn cakes as the bakery can produce.

on survival