((I Haven't Gotten An Ask In Months, So Here's Hoping Someone Gives Me Some Feedback =w=;  ))

If "success == pregnancy," then maybe "accidental pregnancy == serendipity?"

Success is like pregnancy. Everybody congratulates you but nobody knows how many times you got fucked to achieve it.

I've been gone a while and seem to have come back to some grade-SS stupidity. Keep it going!

Please share this! I can’t stress how important this is.

I’m not good at tagging things, add as you see fit.

Tablet: ... Should I start wearing my hair down?..... I might. We’ll see. ((Just a quick sketch, cause I’m working on something big to try and revive this account. If this doesn’t work, I might end up abandoning/killing Ask Tablet.))

Alright, listen up,

Now that Tumblr has completely fucked most people with killing their links (if you put any link, even one that directs back to a Tumblr post, it no longer shows in the search engine), it’s on YOU, the consumer, to make sure things get noticed. By that I mean, if you LIKE something and you don’t reblog it, that’s right, that’s less chance of it getting seen. When a post does poorly, the creator will eventually stop creating. This goes for gifs, icons, headers, writing, art, you name it. Creators will eventually stop. So, you LIKE something, click that little reblog button. Click the queue option. If you want to keep seeing your favorite creators, it’s up to YOU to make sure their posts actually get seen.

And, before anyone wants to pipe up, one person DOES make a difference. If you’re reading this thinking “oh, someone else will reblog, I don’t have to!”. Well, no. You’re wrong because if YOU’RE thinking that, many other people are as well which means, no the post will not be seen and the creator stops creating (or at least publishing for your unpaid consumption).

The post doesn’t match your blog aesthetic? Make a new blog. You don’t have to maintain it. Just click the reblog button and it’ll STILL help get the creators some form of recognition.

If you like seeing creations from creators, then help them out and hit the damn reblog button.

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

This is what a REAL rape prevention campaign looks like

this is the best tik tok ive ever seen i love her so much

What would you say the best part about your job is Tablet?

And people think I’m greedy. 7^7((So, Tumblr is already dropping the ball on notifying me when I’ve got asks 83Lovely))

@judytheoutlaw the stolen cake probably means Kirby: Squeak Squad, where the Squeaks steal (among other things) Kirby's strawberry shortcake slice. ... which leads to a quest culminating in the Squeaks freeing and Kirby defeating Dark Nebula. Nebula, according to the game's ending, is THE RULER OF THEIR UNIVERSE'S UNDERWORLD.