Symbolic Fanart Of Me Tangled In Spiderwebs Representing My Lack Of Autonomy As A Character Trapped Inside

a very unsettling plate found in Cracow, Poland

also before the new series drops i have to say my dream but very unlikely team up at the moment is flower husbands 2 simply because i believe scotts divorce roleplay would be insane

portrait of god

(highly inspired by the short horror film of the same title by dylan clark on youtube)

Among moss and ferns something slept. It knew not of the rose rays of sunrise seeping through young leaves. It could not hear the howling of the wind above or the birds singing to greet the coming of spring.

It dreamt of a place darker than a starless night, of flight and of falling.

It dreamt of hands caked in mud, of crawling and of tearing through a canopy of roots.

Finally it stirred and began unravelling. From a bundle of white fabric limbs began slowly emerging. The small creature rose and only then it became apparent that it was a child, probably a boy, with dishevelled brown hair and clothing that was best described as rags.

He grabbed a broken branch he fashioned into a walking stick, blinked at the sun lazily and wandered away.

As the day went on the birdsong grew quiet. To the child’s delight, despite the strong winds chasing heavy clouds in the sky, fog gathered among the trees. It snaked around almost as if  alive, curling up wherever the sunlight did not quite reach. The boy watched with amazement as it grew. He thought that it almost looked like it was reaching out towards him.

That could have been a reason for concern, since he was alone, deep in the wilderness, away even from the tracts that were reluctantly used, only by heavily armed caravans and the desperate. But he was thirteen, had a stick in his hand for a weapon and could climb trees really fast. This surely meant he was as well equipped as one can be to face the world.

The fog grew and swelled steadily, until the whole world became a collection of blurry shadows.  In the distance something large moved through it.

The boy ran quietly towards where he saw the movement, wanting to make sure it was not just a trick of his eyes. He found nothing there but towering old trees, their branches weaving slowly. The child’s disappointment was short-lasting as at the edge of where he could see something moved again.

Over the next hour it happened multiple times, in the dead quiet of the endless grey ocean something would appear, but always for just a moment, too far to properly see. Sometimes there would come a sound, a call so distant it could have been both of a man or a beast. The child dutifully followed each one, making his way down the gentle slope of the valley.

Just as the boy began to grow bored the fog was filled with a wail so low it was more felt than heard. A distorted cry that made a cold shiver run down the child’s spine. It hung in the air for longer than he was able to hold his breath. At that point it finally occurred to the boy that he may not be safe. Slowly and cautiously he began moving from tree to tree, searching for one he could climb. All of them were an old growth with the nearest branches at many times the child’s height.

The boy sneaked through the endless fog with a growing sense of unease.

Then, he stopped.

Between the trees a new shadow appeared. For a moment the child thought it could have been his, somehow cast many meters away, as it was shaped like a person and more or less his height, but when he waved at it, it remained motionless.

The shadow slowly extended a part of itself that was supposed to be a hand and made a beaconing gesture.

The movement made it sway slightly as if it was not supporting its own weight.

The forest remained deathly silent.

The boy stared at the shadow with eyes wide open and began silently walking forward.

To an outside observer it would have seemed that the child was being enthralled, unnaturally compelled to move and reach out his hand. But that was not the case, the boy moved like one would towards a bird, never seen before, that inexplicably is not flying away, trying to see if it can be touched.

The boy did not know what the shadow was and with every step his excitement grew, because he assumed that what he saw was another person, made blurry by the fog, but moving closer had not made the stranger any clearer. Even when he stopped an arm’s reach away from the apparition it still looked like a shadow cast on the fog by some invisible object. The boy’s mind was on fire with questions of what he was seeing and what he should do, all while he continued to extend his hand towards it. When he realised there is something moving above him he allowed his self-preservation instinct to shine.

In a swift motion the child swung his stick up and brought it down. There was almost no force behind it, it was not meant to be an attack, but a test of a theory.

The stick dropped down meeting no resistance.

The shadow disappeared while the stick passed through it.

“Hello?!?” the child shouted quietly, his voice muffled, even to his own ears. “How did you do that?” the child added, without as much as a hint of fear in his voice.

He spun around looking for where the apparition could have gone and to his surprise saw it swaying gently a few steps away. An indiscernible whisper filled the air.

The shadow extended its hand again and the child began repeating the gesture.

The low painful wail filled the forest again and the boy flinched back to cover his ears.

When he looked up, the shadow was gone.

The child searched for his new friend fruitlessly. He saw no more distant movements and not long after the fog began to dissipate, letting the child out into a late evening in the wilderness. The sun had already began to set, drowning the forest in elongating shadows.

“Do you know what that was?” The child spoke, half addressing his stick, half no one in particular.

The only answer was the chirping of insects.

Constantly obsessed with the concept of a man forced to be a myth. What do you do when every step you take is embedded into the text. Every word you say prose to read. You're part of something bigger than yourself. The narrative tugs you along like water currents. There is no time to rest, to be human. You must be great, you must be legend

I was inspired to try and paint the dream monoliths.

I keep dreaming of physically impossible monolithic structures made out of a glassy stone like dull black marble or tarnished obsidian. I can always see the stars like the structures themselves are floating on the surface of a still lake that perfectly reflects the night sky. That or they're just floating in space.

hey, so i just read "the psychology of the transference" by c.g. jung bc my psychoanalyst told me to. all of the misogyny, rampant racism and overconfident speculation on the role of incestuos desires for the human psyche aside (lmao), i found it a worthwhile read. one of the main points that he seems to make in regards to alchemy is that it wasn't *really* about chemistry/material processes, but more about the images and metaphors used to describe the alchemical process. and jung compares this alchemical imagery, which in large parts revolves around themes of divisions and fusions, to subconscious (psychic) processes that in his opinion also revolve around divisions and fusions (like dissolutions or integrations of the self, contradictions in gender relations and other social relations, etc). and idk, that part makes sense to me. did alchemists really care about the physical world? or did they care about gender, sex, identity, art, death, the horrors, etc?

YES. THE TEXTS HE IS TALKING ABOUT ARE PROTO-CHEMISTRY WORKS.

Alchemy was demonstrably, overwhelmingly, about the physical world. Jung's psychological interpretations of them are --and I cannot stress this enough-- entirely invented ahistorical bullshit.

I cannot overstate the amount of damage that Jung has done to alchemical scholarship. His interpretations of alchemical texts have caused literally thousands of historical proto-chemistry texts to languish in the historical wastebin of "Psychological mumbo jumbo" or "it's just old therapy language tee hee!"

What's worse is he actively misrepresents many of the actual religious or mystical ideas present in the texts he cites. For example, many alchemical texts in the Arab world we're the result of Isma-ili mystics from northern Africa and more gnostic-influenced parts of the early Muslim world. Their equivocation of Hermes Trismegistus with the biblical Enoch, and unique relationship to both hermeticism and Jewish apocrypha, gets ENTIRELY sidelined in Jung's reading, in favor of "it's just early psychology."

Furthermore, Jung tries to make the argument that these images present in alchemical texts are somehow representative of some deeper, universal structure within human psychology. Which is, --again I cannot stress this enough-- howling clown bullshit. Alchemical texts are similar because chemistry works the same wherever you are on the planet. He actively ignores the hermeneutics of different alchemical theories, which change RADICALLY depending on culture and location.

All this in service of adding a pseudo-historical foundation for psychological theories that are about as scientific as astrology.

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.