Nelly Dean Has An Aura Of Being A Normal Person Looking In On The Chaos, But She's Pretty Self-deceptive

My opinion: Yukio Mishima doesn't fit into the "Dai-Nippon Gothic" aesthetic. Mishima's writing is suffused by sunlight and healthy, powerful bodies, symbolic opposites of what "gothic" makes us feel. Mishima's writing is the sea under blue skies and the Ise Grand Shrine. Gothic is disease, frail bodies, lightless spaces.

The difference is that Mishima was actually a fascist and believed it was beautiful, while the Dai-Nippon gothic aesthetic uses imperialist imagery as a form of grotesque violence, mixed up with disease and perversion. Mishima's view on death can shade into this but there's a disconnect because in the gothic aesthetic, it's an outsider's perspective on fascism. Fascism as excessive violence, extravagant criminality, a heterotopia where everyday morality is reversed.

It would be wrong to reduce "Dai-Nippon Gothic" to the restrictive label 'antifascist' but I don't think real fascism can mix coherently with the aesthetic.

Writers who the "Dai-Nippon" aesthetic would do well to appropriate --- Ranpo, Yumeno Kyūsaku, maybe Izumi Kyōka, definitely much of the work of Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

Of course, recontextualized images of Mishima can be appropriated but it's good to remember they're being twisted away from their original meaning

that high end literary critic who was like 'we're sorry readers! we were too elitist and have denied the value of writing with a strong PLOT' is such a sell-out mediocrity. Literary criticism and its separate aesthetic values are supposed to create a space where market standards and popularity are replaced with alternative values, and you're just going to say, 'we need to homogenize with what's popular"? Please have a little imagination and don't betray the writers who can only exist in this space!

realistic,* technically demanding art styles have so much cultural clout over other styles that many people feel compelled to get good at them even when there's no reason to do so. I don't think you need to be good at such things to produce powerful stylized art

*maybe 'illusionistic' would be a better term

The Nebra Sky Disk is actually like an emote!

This was made by Ranier Zenz for Wikimedia

people often talk about how AI makes small choices that a human would never make if they were drawing the image, but when I see Reach's art I feel as if this tendency has been harnessed to create an atmosphere of almost hallucinatory vividness. It's beyond what I've seen in most illustrator's stuff

devil armor

what if it's not a guy at all up close. I'm thinking of the "kunekune" urban legend

This scene in the game makes me laugh...why is that dude falling forever...why can I make out that it's a tiny stick figure...

I'm the Daijou-Daijin of cringe

I think there's horror media that's really similar to this, where the character is 'guilty' of something but from an external perspective it was not really bad. In the story, it makes their situation feel more inevitable and helpless

I think a fun revivalist genre would be like, overbearingly didact medieval morality plays but with absolutely incomprehensible morals. like here's a heavy-handed fable about how if you use the past tense too many times while talking to your nieces, all of your milk will spoil

IMO vampire can mean anyone and everyone who doesn't fit into the ideology of work and employment, which includes both feudal nobility and ppl begging for money at opposite ends of the spectrum, it can be exploited or exploiters, whats important is that they do not contribute to the homogenized social order (which is basically good even for the nobility)

I know vampirism is often used as a metaphor for the drain of the aristocracy but I think it would be fun to have more vampire characters who were just some guy before they got turned. You seek out the most ancient vampire in existence and find out he was a 40 year old wheat farmer in ancient Mesopotamia when he was turned 7,000 years ago and he hasn’t been doing much since then.

People have noticed! My uninformed guess is that whoever is writing these is trying to like, emulate some kind of Chinese prose style that has lots of four-character phrases/proverbial allusions or something? And is using English figures of speech as an equivalent? But I can't read or speak any kind of Chinese so I don't know if that's a real feature of Chinese prose writing. It's just a vibe I get that this is a translation of something that hit different in the source language

flipping back and forth between the document i’m editing for work and the wikipedia page for cantonese opera like a kid hiding a comic book inside their textbook