Https://twitter.com/archeometrie/status/1170031822614474752?s=12

*crouches to go into stealth*

the cracking of my knees alerts the guards, I am immediately killed

Charlotte Eriksson

I’ve realised that what I miss about fantasy is it being truly escapist. I miss it depicting places where I would actually want to go.

Every dang kid I knew waited for their Hogwarts acceptance letter. Reading the books and seeing it on screen gave you this warm, fuzzy feeling and a feeling of longing, even when they were in danger and fighting monsters and evil wizards, you want to be there.

You want to go to Middle Earth, see hobbits and elves and dwarves and run through this land of incredible beauty, mysticism and magic.

You want to be in the TARDIS, seeing the universe.

The more recent trend of fantasy is this gritty, dark realism and places where you would just never want to go. I don’t want to go to Westeros. I don’t want to be in The Hunger Games, I don’t particularly want to be in The Witcher universe. I’m living in the world of Black Mirror and I hate it.

Fantasy used to say “hey our world kinda sucks but here’s a cooler one”, but now it says “hey our world kinda sucks, but here’s an even worse one.”

That isn’t to say that the above are bad. They’re not. 

But I miss beautiful, escapist fantasy that gives me a break. That takes me somewhere magical, somewhere otherworldly and gives me messages of hope and optimism in the face of darkness. I really, really miss that.

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and

Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn't catch you.

Gustave Caillebotte, The Floor Planers, 1875

November 8, 2021 at 04:45PM

Happy Good Omens renewal eheheheheheehhhhhhh

My, you’re a mess, aren’t you?

Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall The Big Sleep (1946), directed by Howard Hawks