dream

it's been 4 years since I first encountered this AMAZING TGCF animation and I've been revisiting it consistently once a month or even more often I couldn't resist drawing a picture based on this animation ⋆｡˚ ☁︎ ˚｡⋆｡˚☽˚｡⋆🦋🦋🦋

And because he was also bred to retrieve he brings me Useful Items all day such as shoes, dirty socks, spoons, any hat left within dog reach, many many sticks, and pieces of paper (because humans love pieces of paper):

If someone wants to tell a light-hearted comedy story that's sold on the basis of 'minority groups can see themselves represented in a positive light', but they kill off The Disabled CharacterTM in a really dodgy way... the writers probably weren't intending to be ableist. But the actuality is that they created a product that feeds into horrific ableist ideas about 'killing disabled people is kinder, actually'. They failed at telling the story they wanted to tell, possibly because of unexplored prejudices or just a lack of skill.

If someone wants to tell a fun story for kids that involves child soldiers, but because of genre conventions, etc., this isn't actually a serious issue.... then decides they want to engage with 'child soldiers' and 'military states' and 'genocide' as the serious, fucked-up issue they are, and makes the point that this world has to change... then decides that actually, no, they're not going to dig any deeper into that, and we're all just going to accept that military states and child soldiers are a genre convention, actually, and the world doesn't need to significantly change in order for a 'happy ending' to feel earned? Then they told the story they wanted to tell, but they arguably told it badly.

For example: an author wants to write an enemies-to-lovers romance novel, does so, and it's a complete flop. There are two possible reasons:

Reason one: this story is not a romance. The characters may be well-written and complex and believably traumatized and have wonderfully entertaining interactions, but they never once seem to even so much as find the other useful to be around, much less like the other's company enough to fall in love with them. For 95% of the plot they visibly, vocally hate each other, and then at the end they kiss and get married and all the other characters go "ah isn't this romantic". This is a "bad story" because it failed to tell the story it was trying to tell. The author wanted to tell a romance and did not do that.

Reason two: this story is badly written. It is a romance, yes, it ticks all the boxes and hits all the plot points and the characters go on a perfectly charted arc from enemies to lovers, but the writing is just plain bad. The characters are flat and uninteresting, the prose is hard to read, the setting is generic, the plot is stupid. This is a "bad story" because it told the story it wanted to tell but told it badly. The author wanted to tell a romance and did in fact do that, but it's still badly done.

A pair of marbled salamanders (Ambystoma opacum) in North Florida, USA

"may i... take you to the station?"