This Cr Smells Like Febreeze The Same Way One Would Use Febreeze To Mask The Smell Of Blood On The Floor

Intro to the 1989 reprint of The Color of Magic the first Discworld book by Terry Pratchett.

“At least ten.” Lmao

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

Some truths about the publishing industry because I certainly got blindsided when going in. Now I'm so broken by this industry I struggle to encourage aspiring writers lmao

As an Autistic Person, I really struggle to complete tasks while I am being watched...

Neurodivergent_lou

Writing, Neil Gaiman, and Kon Satoshi

I almost gave up writing altogether after reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

I didn’t read it as it was coming out in comics, but later, when it was published in collected volumes.

It was too perfect. Too complete. It seemed like it had sprung fully-formed from Gaiman’s head, and he had to spend years waiting for artists to catch up.

It was overwhelming. Unattainable.

I wasn’t reading the book’s post-scripts, though, because I wanted to avoid potential spoilers. I wanted to experience the material, not the author dissecting it.

I did read them on a second pass. There’s a story on Dream Country, the third volume, about a writer keeping a muse captive so she can give him ideas. It’s a piece with characters that tie into Morpheus’ past and who will come up again, woven into the larger narrative. The book also contains a post-script on how the story came about, where Gaiman states it was at first about a succubus, before moving on to talk about his process for working with the artist.

My eyes kept moving forward, brain storing words from the original script, but my consciousness had taken a step back.

Wait, back up, what was that character again?  Who? Calliope. Originally a succubus, replies brain, let me keep going here.

Yes, stupid me. I had assumed Sandman had been gestating inside Gaiman from the start, waiting for an opportunity for the entire story to burst out. He didn’t transcribe a long epic he had already come up with. He wasn’t born with the tale. He worked at it for years, sometimes throwing away material and replacing it with things that fit better. Like a normal human being.

I keep making the same mistake. I wrote about a similar mental bug when talking about Kon Satoshi and Dream Fossil.

We only see the finished product. We don’t see the author sitting down at the typewriting and bleeding.

It’s all work. Some people have more potential and have it easier, others have to work harder at it, but in the end it’s only work. If you want a chance to get better at it, you should treat it as such.

Yall how do I eat in another kfc while being aware about this knowledge

the story of kfc fucks me up man. the colonel founded this gas station that expanded to restaurant, the chicken at the restaurant gets popular, makes KFC, it gets big and he sells it to a corporation for a lot of money. realizes he got sorta scammed out of the true worth of kfc so tries to get more money and they refuse and the courts side against him. then he starts a new chicken restaurant claiming the corporate people were not making chicken to his standards and kfc sued him because kfc owned the colonel's likeness and the courts agreed. a corporation owned this man's name and appearance. he wasnt allowed to use either, thus legally erasing his reputation making it harder for him to get taken seriously in any food venture. the man, to the day he died, was going into kfc's and throwing fits because the food had fallen into such bad shape he hated it was associated with him. and it's like, whether he's a bad man or a good man or whatever, a corporation owned his identity, stopped him from using his reputation and identity in other businesses, and refused to acknowledge his outrage that they changed his recipes and still attributed it to him. this is literally the obnoxious plot of a jay and silent bob movie, but it was this dude's real life. what the fuck.

1000 likes!

I need waffle

5 posts!

I don't know what this is but yay I guess

Maybe if I keep on lying to myself eventually I'll start telling myself the truth