First of all, you really need to meet more people! But maybe if you were the sort of person to go ar

First of all, you really need to meet more people! But maybe if you were the sort of person to go around gallivanting all the time trying to meet people, maybe you wouldn’t have been around to be kind to the Sad Trombone blog, and then everything would have been different and I wouldn’t have stuck around and THIS blog would never have been created at all, so… what I am saying is that you are the cause of all this mess and that you are the sinner at whom we must cast the stones HOW DARE YOU HAVE FOSTERED THIS NONSENSE. LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE. LOOK WHAT YOU’VE DONE!In lieu of further Thoughts on Yaoi, I think it’s as good a time as any to mull over a slightly longer excerpt from the Umberto Eco piece on Casablanca that I quoted the last time I mentioned tropes. (Thoughts on Tropes are the invited-to-family-parties second cousin to Thoughts on Yaoi, right?)But precisely because all the archetypes are here, precisely because Casablanca cites countless other films, and each actor repeats a part played on other occasions, the resonance of intertextuality plays upon the spectator. Casablanca brings with it, like a trail of perfume, other situations that the viewer brings to bear on it quite readily […]Thus Casablanca is not just one film. It is many films, an anthology. Made haphazardly, it probably made itself, if not actually against the will of its authors and actors, then at least beyond their control. And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories and theories of filmmaking. For in it there unfolds with almost telluric force the power of Narrative in its natural state, without Art intervening to discipline it. […] Two cliches make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure, and the height of perversion border on mystical energy, so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime. Something has spoken in place of the director. If nothing else, it is a phenomenon worthy of awe.I like this a lot because I think it does a really good job of capturing what it is about tropey hivemind fics that I find so irresistible. What matters is no longer really the genius of the writer at all– it’s only the writer’s job to let a certain sense of history flow through them into the story, and so these stories become a celebration of fandom itself, of the codes we’ve developed within it, of the understandings we’ve formed with one another. Tropes are the creative reinforcement of community formation! Do you go into a hookerfic and not expect a scene where a sex worker offers their body much too casually to the other half of the pairing in question and consequently breaks their heart a little bit?! Do you not expect a scene where a third-party customer is much too physically rough on said sex worker and said other half finds themselves horrified and protective and outrageously in love?! Of course you do! That’s what we’re supposed to expect! That’s essentially what we’re promised by the fic’s participation in the genre of hookerfic AND THAT’S WHAT WE GET. It’s great, what we do for one another.This, of course, isn’t to say that I think tropes are superior to subversion or that some tropes aren’t immensely problematic – or that community formation doesn’t have its own attendant dangers – but I suppose that’s another (though related) story for another time. The hell is this post already, darkeningtoindigo do you regret your life choices now? DO YOU? BECAUSE YOU SHOULD. More behind the cut! Don’t do that, I hold no truth for you! All I have are my stabby guesses, but at least I’m really glad that you found those stabby guesses somewhat convincing :’(I think the single neatest thing about Invention is its choice of title– it’s so punchy and emblematic. As your resident classicist or medievalist will probably have brought up to everyone’s annoyance at some point (if you have a resident classicist or medievalist) (if you don’t, good, fumigate your place regularly and try to keep it that way), the word invention didn’t always have connotations of creation! In classical rhetoric, the category of inventio is derived from the Latin invenire (“to find”). It’s about finding already-established topics of argument, not about producing something new out of thin air. So this classical invention is exactly the sort of thing that the young Housman is attempting to do when he looks for models to follow in classical literature. Models for the love lyric, models for his love of Jackson. What’s funny is that as the temporal boundary between antiquity and modernity begins to blur, as we and Housman come to realize that the river is a circle, invention starts to take on its modern meaning. Instead of searching for ways to speak his love in the archives of classical poetry, Housman ends up writing his own version of it. That’s his invention of love, the poet’s mantle he shrugs on. Again, I don’t think he ever really renounces the scholar’s mantle, but the shifting valence of the word invention in the title does seem to go hand in hand with Housman’s own shifting sense of self. Something like that. WELL IT’S A GOOD THING OUR RELATIONSHIP HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH MUTUAL RESPECT FOR OUR TASTES IN LITERATURE THEN! In fact I’m pretty sure that we are friends at all in the first place because you spent a couple minutes in 2008 being appalled out loud at why I was the way I was, and then I might have accused you of tyranny. So here’s to another terrible fucking year, you asshole, I guess. Can I?! CAN I?!??!?!! Okay okay I really love rigorous ship manifestos in the way that I love all impassioned works of sustained close reading, but I think there is a fair amount of that under the Mayumiko tag and I’m not super good at it– I tried it once and I just ended up spending the whole time trying to think up strained puns for subsection headings. The puns were bad. The manifesto was bad. Everything was bad and I never finished it. But enough about that, THE POINT IS that what I can do at this juncture is just sort of vomit my feelings on what I think is cool about the way Mayumiko works! I mean what I usually do is cycle a character through the entire fandom, not ship exclusive pairings, and ship wars are the stupidest fucking things in the whole fucking world anyway SO IT’S NOT LIKE I HAVE ANY ILL WILL AT ALL FOR PAIRINGS OTHER THAN MAYUMIKO but let me talk about Mayumiko because you have allowed me to talk about Mayumiko!!!One of my favorite things about Mayumiko is that because Mikorin’s notion of what his role is in relation to Mayu (cool collected worldly sempai-bro) is so exactly what gets upended in depictions of Mayumiko (Mayu is much more together, and lbr when is Mikorin ever together… like at all…) the whole dynamic of the pairing becomes a kind of learning process in which Mikorin discovers that the role he feels he ought to play is not the role that’s necessarily right for him, and THAT’S OKAY TOO. For Mikorin, whose entire existence is based around behaving according to script, targeting predetermined love interests and reciting embarrassing lines he’s picked up secondhand, it would really be a big deal to face the fact that Mayu doesn’t need or want him to play the knowledgeable mentor. That if anything, Mayu enjoys how uniquely unequipped Mikorin is for a role like that.I don’t mean for that to be otaku-shaming, like Mikorin needs to be yanked out of his 2D world and integrated into ~reality~ in order to be a ~correct human being~. Rather than a dismantling of his status quo, I think it’s an elaborating! I think it’s a way of introducing Mikorin to other ways of being, without forcing him to abandon what he likes. Sometimes things don’t go according to script but that’s fine too– sometimes those moments are even better for being so unexpected. So it’s okay Mikorin! You’re great precisely because you can’t seem to make yourself fit the mold!As for Mayu, I like thinking of this as the moment when he first encounters a form of desire that doesn’t sate itself. Because Mikorin is Mikorin, it’s not like he’ll ever really be forthright or easy for Mayu to handle, and Mayu needs to get to his feet to meet Mikorin halfway. It’s not like eating in response to hunger or sleeping in response to fatigue, this is a sort of want that demands constant engagement AND YET MAYU FINDS THAT HE LIKES IT! This push-and-pull with Mikorin is so interesting that THIS IS A DILIGENCE THAT HE CAN GET BEHIND! In the end, if Mayumiko can help the two of them be a little more at ease with venturing outside of themselves, I think that’s great. I think that’s fucking adorable as shit. ♥ Oh my god I’m sorry, you send in a sweet comment like this and I make you scroll all the way through this hellish winding misery-pit of a post where I give needlessly lengthy and aimless answers to every question (which, on that note… sorry to everyone else as well). But hopefully that has made you stop laughing?! Please contact a doctor if your inappropriate mirth has lasted four hours or more. “Cat BL” is the worst cause of death I can possibly think of >:| -- source link

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