miss mae *__*

oh, so we died?

man ykwhat, i didn't wanna say it but i was thinking about it earlier and swan being released so soon after abyss monarch, after something like three years of no new legendaries (not counting the dragons here), it feels like devsis was riding the high of releasing a good legendary with an interesting story and worldbuilding. feels like they were trying to cash grab what they got from the success of abyss monarch by quickly releasing swan so soon after. like, come on, i dont even think there were two events between abyss monarch and the sugar swan's releases, and those are two LEGENDARIES. bam bam. we had like zero room to breathe between them

also like, come on. they released swan from NPC hell after SEVEN YEARS and her whole event is unsatisfying because she wasn't even in the event for like 90% of it. i like the worldbuilding they did for the dessert paradise and i love blue slushy, but it really didn't feel like a new legendary release event.

if you ask me, sugar swan shouldnt have released at all during that event, ESPECIALLY because of that teaser cliffhanger at the end of the story! if they had used the dessert guardian test event to build up to the sugar swan's legendary release at a later date, that ending cliffhander would've given devsis room to make a future event to release her! they could've given swan the same proper build-up they gave abyss monarch. did you guys SEE how in-depth the designers went with "The Making of Wandercrab"??? why did swan get SHAFTED so hard

swan is an extremely indifferent character and i like the angle they're going for with her but. their execution of her story and the timing of her release and everything...??? it just felt SUPER flat. like they went all in building wandercrab for abyss monarch and shafted swan SO bad bc they wanted money. swan doesnt get an intricately built story and setting the way abyss monarch does with the tower of frozen waves leading into sugarteara leading into wandercrab, and it KILLS me bc swan's release could have actually been REALLY cool if they'd just teased her in the dessert guardian test event and then waited to release her in a future event.

like, hear me out. what if it had gone like, blue slushy, epic cookie, first release, they introduce the spring and summer sections of the dessert paradise. red panna cotta cookie, epic cookie, second release, they introduce fall and winter sections of the dessert paradise. everything goes as is, but the swan isnt released, she's just touched on in the story and is a little cameo at the end! like wow, she CAN turn into a cookie that's pretty cool. and its this big payoff for blue slushy's character arc and it gives some closure to red panna cotta's conflict with blue slushy too, all without dropping the sugar swan too much in there because the story wasn't really ABOUT her as a character, just her as an IDEAL.

and then, there's the ending cliffhanger with the black sugar duck, which gives them a perfect opportunity to springboard from that into a future event where swan is released!

and remember how in the event they said if the swan doesn't return, winter will come? well, what if in this hypothetical future event, something does happen to the swan, and it's the black sugar duck's fault, and winter DOES come.

i think it'd be an interesting spin to add elements of the demeter persephone hades story too, where persephone spends three months in the underworld with her husband and demeter is so upset at being away from her daughter that persephone's absence causes winter

black sugar duck does something to the swan, winter comes. the dessert paradise guardian birds have to go find and free/save the swan to stop winter! MAN THIS COULD'VE BEEN THEIR WINTER TO SPRING EVENT NEXT YEAR TOO

idk. maybe also the black sugar duck becomes a cookie because of whatever they did to the swan and is the first release cookie, but we don't KNOW it's them. we can only guess until halfway through the event where we find out they're purposefully leading the dessert guardians astray from finding the sugar swan because they want to continue being beautiful and its a huge conflict! and then swan releases as the second cookie in the event, and we get some characterization for her that's beyond just "she's an indifferent goddess, neither malevolent or benevolent". maybe she willingly GAVE some of her power to the black sugar duck. maybe she's the persephone to the black sugar duck's hades. maybe she's the indifference to the black sugar duck's extreme passion and they balance each other out.

meh idk. i just feel like the sugar swan's release event could have been better thought out instead of being a transparent cash grab. also red panna cotta SHOULD have been playable.

Is it too late to do this for 2023? I don’t remember who started this, but I got the template from @piraterefrigerator. Here are my Top 5 Blorbos of 2023!

1.) Baron Friedrich von Glower (the Gabriel Knight series) - Do I even need to explain? My hyperfixation on this series is so real. He’s a queer werewolf who just really wants a boyfriend, he’s been lonely for like 200 years. Was done dirty by the writer, and deserves better.

2.) Percy Jackson (the Percy Jackson series) - surprisingly knocking down Emma a spot, Percy comes back as a comfort character because of the new tv series. He’s dumb. He loves his mom. He wants the gods to pay child support. He’s THE Percy and my middle school self is having the time of her life.

3.) Emma Swan (Once Upon A Time) - She’s a comfort character so I still think about her. Especially now that I’m noticing the parallels between her and Percy in the show. I’ll try to rewatch OUAT while I wait for the next PJ episode. I still adore her character development and her relationship with Killian Jones/Captain Hook

4.) Cheshire Cat (Alice’s Warped Wonderland version) I recently just finished another let’s play of this game, so I’m thinking about him again.

5.) Mae Borowski (Night in The Woods) - Haven’t played the game in the while, but I still think about her, especially during November.

Let’s see who makes the list next year and if I gain any new blorbos in 2024!

lillie mae faulk || carmen

Absolutely lost it here.

Soft Dom Elvis who love seeing readers mouth full of his cum

🫣

“Ah, open your mouth, pretty girl.” Elvis would tap at your chin with his thumb. You followed his command, the tears from getting your face fucked still streaming down your face. “Such a pretty little thing, mouth full of me .”

tags for characters ( part two ).

pippa rojas ( fiona palomo, 25 ).

rafael rojas ( michael trevino, 38 ).

remington solokov ( reneé rapp, 25 ).

sara dinh ( lana condor, 26 ).

shiny kennedy ( josh heuston, 27 ).

shoshanna jaffe ( kaia gerber, 23 ).

sofia reyes ( hailee steinfeld, 27 ).

tatyana dmitrievna ( katheryn winnick, 46 ).

teagan deverell ( daniel sharman, 37 ).

tobias kahan ( milo manheim, 22 ).

tristan dunne ( thomas doherty, 29 ). 

ursula cabot ( bebe wood, 23 ).

victoria preston ( phoebe dynevor, 28 ).

willow mae lamontagne ( bree kish, 28 ). 

winnie prescott ( maya hawke, 27 ).

wyatt kennedy ( cody christian, 29 ).

xochitl torres ( rachel zegler, 22 ).

yasmine pierron née erdoğan ( melis sezen, 27 ). 

zelda swan ( sarah snook, 36 ).

zoya demir ( asena keskinci, 23 ).

William Shakespeare // pinterest // Feel Good (2020-2021) cr. Joe Hampson & Mae Martin // Natalie Diaz These Hands, If Not Gods // Sandra Cisneros Woman at Hollering Creek: Stories; "Never Marry a Mexican" // Holland NUMBER BOY // Richard Siken Crush // 스물다섯 스물하나 Twenty-Five Twenty-One (2022) dir. Jung Ji-hyun // Sappho // Dodie She // Maureen Seaton Furious Cooking; "Swan Lake" // unknown // Frank Ocean Forrest Gump // แปลรักฉันด้วยใจเธอ I Told Sunset About You / I Promised You the Moon (2020-2022) dir. Naruebet Kuno & Tossaphon Riantong // Danez Smith Recklessly (via @tendermimi)

While some of both Davis and Crawford’s work could arguably be described as camp (for the former, King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest; for the latter, later-era films such as Strait-Jacket and aspects of the wondrous Nicholas Ray film Johnny Guitar), that their entire careers and places within film history are defined as such does a disservice to their artistry. But they aren’t alone in representing what has become a troubling trend when it comes to women’s work. As camp entered the mainstream lexicon, especially after Susan Sontag’s landmark 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the term has been increasingly tied to work featuring women who disregard societal norms. Camp is often improperly and broadly applied to pop culture that features highly emotional, bold, complex, cold, and so-called “unlikable” female characters. I’ve seen films and TV shows such as the witty masterwork All About Eve; the beguiling Mulholland Drive; the stylized yet heartwarming Jane the Virgin; Todd Haynes’s Patricia Highsmith adaptation Carol; the blistering biopic Jackie; the deliciously malevolent horror film Black Swan; Joss Whedon’s exploration of girlhood and horror, Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the landmark documentary Grey Gardens (which inspired the 2009 HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore); and even icons such as Beyoncé and Rihanna be described as camp. Look at any list of the best camp films and you’ll see an overwhelming number of works that feature women and don’t actually fit the label. Usually, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the film whose behind-the-scenes story provides Murphy’s launching pad for Feud, will be at the top of the list.

While camp need not be a pejorative, that hasn’t stopped it from being widely used as such. In effect, being labeled as camp can turn the boldest works about the interior lives of complex women into a curiosity, a joke, a punch line. The ease with which camp is applied to female-led films and shows of this ilk demonstrates that for all the (still-paltry) gains Hollywood has made for women in the decades since Davis and Crawford worked, our culture is still uncomfortable respecting women’s stories.

That major Hollywood icons such as Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford (and, more recently, Natalie Portman, thanks to Jackie) have been roped into this lineage isn’t surprising. Society doesn’t know what to do with women of this ilk without discrediting their very womanhood. Take artist and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s offensive description of Mae West in an essay on camp: “[She] played with androgyny to the degree that her final performance — her autopsy — was necessary to prove her biological femaleness.” In his 2013 essay “Why Is Camp So Obsessed with Women?”, J. Bryan Lowder expands on Sontag’s most well-known line: “It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” Lowder writes, “‘Woman,’ the concept within the quotation marks, is not the same thing, at all, as a real woman; the former is a mythology, a style, a set of conventions, taboos, and references, while the latter is a shifting, changeable, and ultimately indefinable living being. Of course, there may be some overlap.” But if all gender is a performance, where does the “real” woman begin? And why does the presence of camp hold more importance than the actual work and voices of actresses such as Crawford, who have come to be defined by it?

At times, camp can feel like a suffocating label. Its proponents often misconstrue the fact that recreating oneself as a character is not merely an aesthetic for women, but rather, for many, a matter of survival. Living in a culture that profoundly scorns ambition, autonomy, and independence in women, girls learn quickly the narrow parameters of femininity available to them. When they transcend these parameters, life can get even more difficult. Women often pick up and drop various forms of presentation in order to move through the world more easily. Performance as a woman — in terms of how one speaks, walks, talks, acts — can be a means of controlling one’s own narrative. Camp often limits this part of the discussion, focusing instead on the sheer thrill of watching larger-than-life female characters cut and snark their way across the screen. How these works speak to women, past and present, becomes a tertiary concern at best, and the work loses a bit of its importance in the process; it either comes to be regarded as niche or, if it still has mainstream prominence, as abject spectacle. In turn, the conversations around these works become less about the women at their centers and more about how those women are presented.

Much of Baby Jane’s camp legacy comes down to how more recent audiences have interpreted Davis’s performance. She’s ferocious, frightening, and grotesque. But framing Davis’s performance as camp, as Murphy does, doesn’t take into account how dramatically acting has shifted over the course of film history. In some ways, camp has become a label used when modern audiences don’t quite understand older styles of acting. Modern actors privilege the remote, the cold, the detached. The more scenery-chewing performances that make the labor of acting visible — such as the transformative work that Jake Gyllenhaal did in Nightcrawler, or most of Christian Bale’s career — is typically the domain of men. (Or, at least, it’s only men who can get away with it without being called campy.) As Shonni Enelow writes in a marvelous piece for Film Comment, “[Jennifer] Lawrence’s characters in Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games don’t arrive at emotional release or revelation; rather than fight to express themselves, her characters fight not to. We can see the same kind of emotional retrenchment and wariness in a number of performances by the most popular young actors of the last several years.” Davis’s work as an actor was the antithesis of that; she painted in bold colors. Even her quietest moments brim with an intensity that cannot be denied.

A quick list of favorite video essays on YT?

You fool! You have activated my trap card! Now suffer the flood of recommendations!

We'll start with the more famous ones and work our way down to smaller and smaller creators as we go:

The Nostalgia Critic and The Wall by Folding Ideas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rokAtlFGa7Y

Violence & Protest by Philosophy Tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh4G1Gjv7bA

Mel Brooks, The Producers, and the Ethics of Satire about N@zis by Lindsay Ellis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62cPPSyoQkE

Weighing the Value of Director's Cuts | Scanline by hbomberguy and Shannon Strucci: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6OT77T7YlE

Incels by Contrapoints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0

POLYBIUS - The Video Game That Doesn't Exist by Ahoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7X6Yeydgyg

Disney's FastPass: A Complicated History by Defunctland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yjZpBq1XBE

Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki by Shaun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go

The Alt-Right Playbook: How to Radicalize a Normie by Innuendo Studios: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g

TRAINWRECKORDS: "American Life" by Madonna by Todd in the Shadows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCMNzdm_RKo

The Speedrun Where Link Stares at Rupees for 17 Hours by Lowest Percent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2nRW3wKnVY

The Simpsons and the Death of Parody by Jonas Čeika - CCK Philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi_fxwLBSFo

CATS & The Weird Mind of TS Eliot | An Analysis by Maggie Mae Fish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tYcPuVYDHw

Fashion in Final Fantasy by ThorHighHeels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3Yl0Moy_ic

action button reviews boku no natsuyasumi by Action Button: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=779coR-XPTw

Transvestigation: The Conspiracy Theory That Everyone Is Transgender by Mia Mulder: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QH5-MDXzfmg

The Matrix Sequels Are Good, Actually by Sophie from Mars and Sarah Zedig: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0VnYcMHuDc

The Last Unicorn: Why Must You Always Speak In Riddles? by What's So Great About That?: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNrTM74pdTk

Bisexual Lighting: the Rise of Pink, Purple and Blue by KyleKallgrenBHH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gU3IA4u-J8

I Watched ALL the Swan Princess Sequels by Laura Crone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saM3afhPfO8

Knives Out: The Simple Art of Trolling Everyone by let's talk about stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_2kzuC3GM0

Crime & Humanity in Yakuza by HeavyEyed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbElfOjJJbw

FAKE FRIENDS EPISODE TWO: parasocial hell by Shannon Strucci: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLA-uFKjQ-g

Left Wing White Supremacy? by JohntheDuncan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZaOCR-mUm8

How Will Games Be Preserved? | Capturing the Frozen Flame by Transparency: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVo4M57wWLc

Queer Relativity by Aranock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di1aTOJUncM

Deeply unserious female

Jessica Lange as Lillie Mae Faulk in 'FEUD: Capote vs. The Swans [S02E02]

Thank you all so much for the kind words on my dark!Mae AU! Here’s another painting for it, this time featuring Elrond as he dances at Maedros’ dark fae court, similar to how Lúthien danced for Morgoth XDD In the same vein, Elrond (and Elros; he’s hanging around there somewhere) is trying to lull Maedros into a sense of security/ease.

I imagine Elrond’s dance is close to a ballet style, hence his pointe-like shoes. That said, I wanted to practice with perspective for this painting, and got some awesome feedback from the Artists of Arda discord chat, but ultimately set that version aside and went with this! I do feel that this version has a better composition story-wise: Maedros wants to keep Elrond close, and won’t let him dance too far away.

Also, while I was drawing Maedros’ guards, I realized that they kinda resemble my designs for Maglor and Celegorm ... Which led to the idea that Maedros subconsciously surrounds himself with people who look like his dead family :’’’’D Angst ahoy! loll

For this painting, I referenced the setting of the Swan Lake ballet, starring Natalia Osipova, specifically Odile’s Black Swan solo before the queen and her court. And the first version of this painting is under the cut, if you want to see:

Help I hate drawing grids lmaooo

When your breakup depression is telling you to turn to your comfort characters but you don’t have time to indulge in the stories those comfort characters are in:

“Well, at least I have a tag for them so I can look at their faces!”

1928 Mae West in her swan bed in the play “Diamond Lil (the finest woman who ever walked the streets)” which played at the Royal Theatre on Broadway. From Karen Starr, FB.