anyways if you grew up as a fat little girl and ended up as a fat trans man, you should get 10000$ in emotional compensation because holy fuck people are cruel
I know that realistically you can only fit so many movies into a list of approximately 100, but I cannot take that “How many of tumblr’s favorite movies have you seen?” list that’s been going around seriously because there are some truly egregious omissions.
Some of it is very clearly recency bias, which makes me wonder if the op truly wasn’t on here in 2013 or so, but you’re telling me you made a list of “tumblr’s favorite movies” that doesn’t include Pacific Rim or Mad Max: Fury Road? Because, like, I was there, Gandalf.
I’m a ridiculous human and genuinely couldn’t sleep until I tried my hand at a better, more balanced list – though of course, I have my own biases when it comes to what corners of this website I’ve lurked in over the years. For what it’s worth, I did consult the last several Years In Review, while also drawing on the fact that I’ve been here for over a decade. But if there’s anything that truly doesn’t feel like it should have made the cut, blame my mutuals for putting it on my dash all the time.
(And apologies, but I couldn’t seem to find Goncharov among the website’s listings)
Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:
ALT
For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.
So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn’t trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?
Cool.
So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?
Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn’t look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?
Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?
Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?
Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.
Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn’t know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.
Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”
Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.
Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.
Ultimately, it’s not about what the writer intended. That’s what the whole death of the author thing means.
If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It’s the stuff that the other person doesn’t even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.
Also, a poem written by a poet who got high is still a poem written by a poet.
People love to say dismissive bullshit like, “oh, that’s just the drugs talking” but actually, drugs can’t fucking talk! It is always the human being doing the talking regardless of how intoxicated they are. The drugs are not creating the poetry. The poet’s mind is creating the poetry. A person doesn’t stop being a person just because they took something.
ALT
