i love you like a rotten dog, i love you like my canines are falling out of my gums. like a monster, like a beast. like something not worth loving back.

Marie Lu The Young Elites / @/bloodyhellharry (on tumblr) from The Infamous Willow Prank, Part Three / Hélène Cixous excerpt from Love of the Wolf, "Stigmata: Escaping Texts" / @/thymoss (on tumblr) / Virginia Woolf The Waves / Deborah Landau Soft Targets / Tory Adkisson Anecdote of the Pig

i. Marie Lu, The Young Elites

[ "So. Tell me, little wolf. Would you like to punish those who have wronged you?" ]

ii. @/bloodyhellharry

[ Pencil drawing of three panels of a comic strip. The first image is of a closed hatch. The second image shows the hatch being opened slightly. The third imagine is the largest. It shows a wolf with a large shadow, snarling at the cracked hatch. "IF HE'D GOT / AS FAR AS THIS HOUSE, / HE'D HAVE MET A FULLY GROWN / WEREWOLF" ]

iii. Hélène Cixous, Love of the Wolf

[ "The lamb loves its wolf. The wolf turns all white and starts quivering out of love of the lamb. The lamb loves the wolf's fragility, and the wolf loves the frail one's force. The wolf is now the lamb's lamb and the lamb has tamed the wolf. Love blackens the lamb." ]

iv. @/thymoss

[ Messy sketch of the head of an animal with teeth surrounding the outside of it's face, pointing away from it. "I will / remove my teeth, for I / want to remain / kind despite / my anger" ]

v. Virginia Woolf, The Waves

[ "I press you to me. / Come, pain, feed on me. / Bury our fangs into my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob." ]

vi. Deborah Landau, Soft Targets

[ "We are animal hungry down to our delicate bones." ]

vii. Tory Adkisson, Anecdote of the Pig

[ "Do you still believe myths / can save you? Foolish creature. / Let me be clear: every version of the story / ends with you being slaughtered." ]

NBC Hannibal really fucked up my ability to individually assess new media i consume as its own self. Because now, every show, novel, poems, and even songs just fall into two categories in my mind: (1) The Hannibal coded, and; (2) The Non-Hannibal coded

please allow me to share my favorite excerpt of Stigmata by Hélène Cixous

"Sign my death with your teeth."

"Want me down to the marrow."

"Eat me up, my love, or else I'm going to eat you up."

L'amour du loup

I think it’s really interesting that Luo Binghe is a person who’s always been hungry, even if not in the technical sense.

It makes sense. His mom became the one person who treated him kindly, who seemed to *love* him in a world that rejected him at every turn. She was the proof for him that the world was good, that he could be loved. After her death, he’s left reeling and grasping to the things that tie him to her (food, his pendant, the things she taught him). He heads to CQMS and proceeds to be abused, bullied, and further rejected by the people society deemed to be Pillars of Justice and Good. Shen Yuan is the big change here- Binghe being given true affection before the abyss is the largest factor in how he ends up (in contrast to Bingge)

Hélène Cixous, “Love of the wolf” in Stigmata

[ID: Joyfully you become incomprehensible - two strangers together. You begin to adore a god that nobody else bows down to.]

Hélène Cixous, “Love of the wolf.” In Stigmata: Escaping Texts, translated by Keith Cohen, 86-87.

“But sometimes it’s the wolf that falls into the jaws of the lamb. The wolf, out of love, falls backwards into the circle of fire. [...] What ties this wolf to this lamb, she figures, is the fact that it hasn’t eaten it. Painful mystery of the gift that returns through reflection: what the wolf loves in the lamb is its own goodness. It’s thanks to the lamb that the wolf accedes to the plane of love — the love that gives of itself without hope, without calculation, without response, but that nevertheless gives of itself, seeing itself give of itself. [...] But thereafter — thereafter there is the aftermath. Now the wolf can no longer break away from the lamb, for the lamb retains, for better or worse, traces of the gift. That which is given in love can never be taken back. It is me my entire self that I give with the gift of love. This is why the wolf can’t stop loving the lamb, the chosen one. Repository of the wolf. All of the wolf. That’s how love can ruin the lover. [...] The lamb loves its wolf. The wolf turns all white and starts quivering out of love for the lamb. The lamb loves the wolf's fragility, and the wolf loves the frail one's force. The wolf is now the lamb's lamb and the lamb has tamed the wolf.”

— Hélène Cixous tr. Keith Cohen, in “Love of the Wolf” from Stigmata.

outcast of the village

I was unfortunately so gripped by the excerpt in this post that I found the collection of essays it's from and read the entirety of this short essay! So here's some excerpts from it I like:

The essay is amazing and I plan on reading the collection in it's entirety. The collection is titled Stigmata: Escaping Text by Hélène Cixous.

the girls 🐺🐺🐺🍉

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

FNAF movie Vanessa becomes a Roxy fan

I'm reminded so much of Binghe in Cixous’ 'Stigmata' (specifically ‘Love Of The Wolf’)

“For us, eating and being eaten belong to the terrible secret of love... The story of torment itself is a very beautiful one. Because loving is wanting and being able to eat up and yet to stop at the boundary." (pg 78)

"...who says or doesn’t say, but who signifies: I beg you, eat me up. Want me down to the marrow. And yet manage it so as to keep me alive... and I urge you: bite me. Sign my death with your teeth." (pg 78)

like cmon, you mean to tell me this doesn't remind you of them?

"The wolf says to the child: I’m going to eat you up. Nothing tickles the child more. That’s the mystery: why does the idea that you’re going to eat me up fill me with such pleasure and such terror? It’s to get this pleasure that you need the wolf. The wolf is the truth of love, its cruelty, its fangs, its claws, our aptitude for ferocity. Love is when you suddenly wake up as a cannibal, and not just any old cannibal, or else wake up destined for devourment." (pg 77-78)

Now while I've yet to do an in-depth analysis of Bingqiu's relationship, I have done one of Binghe and I really really love how he aligns with a concept I can't fully name. it has something to do with love as defying your nature, or the expectations set for you, or your past. Love as a choice you make, and as a conscious effort to be better.

I don't know if I'm just connecting two things I enjoy or making everything I do about the Thing I Currently Like, but I thought id put it out there anyway (cause I'm pretty sure if it doesn't apply to Bingqiu, then it applies better to another ship from danmei I've yet to read *ahem a lot of them*)

Edit: stop repost this without permission and credit please. Like, don’t do that fr.

They are amigos and I love them

//they're listening your fav song//

O ancient pleasures of hide-and-seek, the first game of all, the game inscribed in our flesh (kitten flesh, newborn flesh) for millennia before our being born. / O the mystery of the mystery-game, that all of us, of all species, children, felines, dogs, celebrate. / Crying ‘look for me I’m hidden I’m lost find me.’ How good it feels to be lost, to be looked for, to be found, to tremble with all those fears together: fear of not being discovered, fear of being discovered, fear of not trembling with fear.

Hélène Cixous, “Love of the wolf.” In Stigmata: Escaping Texts, translated by Keith Cohen, 90.