shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

Imagine spending all your energy being cool and mysterious 24/7.

What an idiot have I mentioned I love him?

Idea came from a cool post @nouverx made about Alastor’s possible sleeping habits. 💕

please help me- i used to be pretty smart but i’m having so much trouble grasping the concept of diegetic vs non-diegetic bdsm!

gfkjldghfd okay first of all I'm sorry for the confusion, if you're not finding anything on the phrase it's because I made it up and absolutely nobody but me ever uses it, but I haven't found a better way to express what I'm trying to say so I keep using it. but now you've given me an excuse to ramble on about some shit that is only relevant to me and my deeply inefficient way of talking and by god I'm going to take it.

SO. the way diegetic and non-diegetic are normally used is to talk about music and sound design in movies/tv shows. in case you aren't familiar with that concept, here's a rundown:

diegetic sound is sound that happens within the world of the movie/show and can be acknowledged by the characters, like a song playing on the stereo during a driving scene, or sung on stage in Phantom of the Opera. it's also most other sounds that happen in a movie, like the sounds of traffic in a city scene, or a thunderclap, or a marching band passing by. or one of the three stock horse sounds they use in every movie with a horse in it even though horses don't really vocalize much in real life, but that's beside the point, the horse is supposed to be actually making that noise within the movie's world and the characters can hear it whinnying.

non-diegetic sound is any sound that doesn't exist in the world of the movie/show and can't be perceived by the characters. this includes things like laugh tracks and most soundtrack music. when Duel of Fates plays in Star Wars during the lightsaber fight for dramatic effect, that's non-diegetic. it exists to the audience, but the characters don't know their fight is being backed by sick ass music and, sadly, can't hear it.

the lines can get blurry between the two, you've probably seen the film trope where the clearly non-diegetic music in the title sequence fades out to the same music, now diegetic and playing from the character's car stereo. and then there are things like Phantom of the Opera as mentioned above, where the soundtrack is also part of the plot, but Phantom of the Opera does also have segments of non-diegetic music: the Phantom probably does not have an entire orchestra and some guy with an electric guitar hiding down in his sewer just waiting for someone to break into song, but both of those show up in the songs they sing down there.

now, on to how I apply this to bdsm in fiction.

if I'm referring to diegetic bdsm what I mean is that the bdsm is acknowledged for what it is in-world. the characters themselves are roleplaying whatever scenarios their scenes involve and are operating with knowledge of real life rules/safety practices. if there's cnc depicted, it will be apparent at some point, usually right away, that both characters actually are fully consenting and it's all just a planned scene, and you'll often see on-screen negotiation and aftercare, and elements of the story may involve the kink community wherever the characters are. Love and Leashes is a great example of this, 50 Shades and Bonding are terrible examples of this, but they all feature characters that know they're doing bdsm and are intentional about it.

if I'm talking about non-diegetic bdsm, I'm referring to a story that portrays certain kinks without the direct acknowledgement that the characters are doing bdsm. this would be something like Captive Prince, or Phantom of the Opera again, or the vast majority of bodice ripper type stories where an innocent woman is kidnapped by a pirate king or something and totally doesn't want to be ravished but then it turns out he's so cool and sexy and good at ravishing that she decides she's into it and becomes his pirate consort or whatever it is that happens at the end of those books. the characters don't know they're playing out a cnc or D/s fantasy, and in-universe it's often straight up noncon or dubcon rather than cnc at all. the thing about entirely non-diegetic bdsm is that it's almost always Problematic™ in some way if you're not willing to meet the story where it's at, but as long as you're not judging it by the standards of diegetic bdsm, it's just providing the reader the same thing that a partner in a scene would: the illusion of whatever risk or taboo floats your boat, sometimes to extremes that can't be replicated in real life due to safety, practicality, physics, the law, vampires not being real, etc. it's consensual by default because it's already pretend; the characters are vehicles for the story and not actually people who can be hurt, and the reader chose to pick up the book and is aware that nothing in it is real, so it's all good.

this difference is where people tend to get hung up in the discourse, from what I've observed. which is why I started using this phrasing, because I think it's very crucial to be able to differentiate which one you're talking about if you try to have a conversation with someone about the portrayal of bdsm in media. it would also, frankly, be useful for tagging, because sometimes when you're in the mood for non-diegetic bodice ripper shit you'd call the police over in real life, it can get really annoying to read paragraphs of negotiation and check-ins that break the illusion of the scene and so on, and the opposite can be jarring too.

it's very possible to blur these together the same way Phantom of the Opera blurs its diegetic and non-diegetic music as well. this leaves you even more open to being misunderstood by people reading in bad faith, but it can also be really fun to play with. @not-poignant writes fantastic fanfic, novels, and original serials on ao3 that pull this off really well, if you're okay with some dark shit in your fiction I would highly recommend their work. some of it does get really fucking dark in places though, just like. be advised. read the tags and all that.

but yeah, spontaneous writer plug aside, that's what I mean.

Obsessed with characters who portray themselves as worse than they are. Who are lying to everyone including themselves about it. People generally assume if someone's lying about themselves they're trying to look better but sometimes they're trying to look worse. They attribute agency to where they had none, add intend to accidents, try to convince everyone that this is something they did instead of something that happened to them.

Early visual development for Wish (2023) by Griselda Sastrawinata-Lemay and Brittney Lee.

An earlier version of the film saw Star take on a human form as a magical, glowing character inspired by Peter Pan. Ultimately, the creative team reconceptualized Star as an ethereal, playful entity resembling Mickey Mouse. "Now Star and Asha have an emotional journey. They are soulmates." -Allison Moore.

Leah Jeffries is playing Annabeth like she's one thousand years old in the body of a twelve-year-old and she is so correct.

Mizu and Baby Mizu

Do You Love The Color Of The 413?

✦ Slap ✦

Thinking again about how Suzanne esentially subverted the "beloved famous man that is actually a horrible person in real life" with Finnick, who is the complete opposite of that.

Finnick has this whole image costructed around him by the people that abused him for years: the Capitol's darling, their golden boy, the sex symbol of Panem, the man that has countless lovers but leaves them constantly and doesn't look back etc. And you would expect, initially, to meet a man that retains at least a part of that persona in his day to day life. But Finnick doesn't, not even one bit.

You see instead a man that is deeply in love and completely devoted to the one woman he quite literally adores, a man that protects Mags, his old mentor and his mother figure, as much as he can, a man that wouldn't leave Johanna behind, a man that gathers whatever strenght he has left to speak publicly about the abuse inflicted upon him at the government's hands; the opposite of what the Capitol's media and reputation made him out to be.

birthday comic for wen ning 🏹

it’s still april 11th in my time zone. this counts

just finished opla mood

i vote that next year instead of reading Dracula we do a Jeeves & Wooster Book Club. those two never got the rabid tumblr shipping fandom they deserved (disqualified for the sheer technicality of being published a century too soon). we must correct this injustice

I made some colored refs for my comic ~ And also some sketches because can you guess who is my favorite haha

What do you like about the Diasomnia boys if I may ask?

I always love hearing about the different reasons people enjoy characters.

I mean, c'mon. he has split custody over Sebek okay

also, Lilia in particular has maybe the best timeskip character development of all time

honestly it was a red flag when bbc sherlock went “well obviously the word written in blood isn’t the german word for revenge, it’s clearly the beginning of the name ‘rachel’, what absolute idiot would fail to see that” when in the original novel it is, in fact, the german word for revenge, which sherlock points out gleefully to a roomful of policemen who all figure it’s the beginning of the name ‘rachel.’

and by red flag I mean it was a clear sign that the adaptation was trying to one-up the source material, instead of engaging with it with love.