Brandon O'Brien @therisingtithes@wandering.shop

we live in a universe with both blaseball and the sequel to 17776 exist, as if the internet is straining to produce as much pure liquid hopefulness as it can muster before the year ends, and it is driving me absolutely wild

At that point, I reckon the real question becomes "when a clash occurs in how a work approaches these ideas, do I gain understanding from the work, or from reading it?", if that makes sense--that you can gain something radically affirming through your reading, & discard the rest.

That is to say that it's possible for a work to intend or perform a truly radical theme while still avoiding, misconstruing, or being read as critically dismissing another important idea, yet both readings, while vastly disparate on the work's value, will be feminist readings.

(not my definitive answer, I think, but me processing a damn good question)

I think an individual work will never be as feminist as the critical reading applied to it?
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RT @cxorlando
okay, this is something that i've been thinking about all day.

what makes a literary work "feminist" to you? what does it mean to call a book feminist, what do you expect from a story that is labelled that way?
https://twitter.com/cxorlando/status/1310736127247241217

What matters most about the things that we enjoy, and the ways in which we enjoy them, is that we do so with gusto, that no one can stop us, and that neither those objects nor those ways of enjoyment cause harm to others, promise that harm, or seek to limit others' enjoyment.
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RT @synxiecbeta
what opinion do you want to share that would be more interesting than posting this image and being needlessly combative?
https://twitter.com/synxiecbeta/status/1310622601287471105

I’m obviously not sure I’m ‘sold’ yet, but it surely is saying a lot of things very upfront about a subset of fandom.

I just can’t get out of my brain that the original theme of combating the tyranny of virus-induced eugenics is… struggling to read the room.

I’m only in the early beats of episode one of Utopia, but the telling sly dig at male fandom isn’t that the male fanboys devalue the critique of the first woman they see so they could defend their own literalisms of Dystopia.

It’s that two of them cosplay as the cruel villain.

Here are some cute cats in Cats are Cute, because I haven’t shown you Cats are Cute’s cute cats in quite some time:

I just got my hands on @mariekeyn’s EVEN IF WE BREAK and I cannot wait to dig in! But I’m gonna have to save it as a treat for when I finish work, so it’s gonna be a while… but look at it! It looks so delightfully haunting!

There is a high-level language/visual gag here that I’ve been wanting to make for so long I’ve forgotten how I planned to make it.

Finally, @LiteralSoup got hololive out of their system via the truest form of exorcism, the Essay (which I definitely recommend reading)
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RT @LiteralSoup
I spent almost 4k words talking about Hololive and vtubing so I can finally empty my brain of thoughts.

Read here if you're interested:
https://literalsoup.wordpress.com/2020/09/28/help-i-cant-stop-watching-hololive/
https://twitter.com/LiteralSoup/status/1310582282076344327

👀👀👀👀👀
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RT @TheMarySue
Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will play Black Adam in the upcoming film.
https://www.themarysue.com/aldis-hodge-hawkman-black-adam/
https://twitter.com/TheMarySue/status/1310331166864453632

If anyone's actually interested in those questions, I'm on Letterboxd as therisingtithes and I finally wrote my review of the thing
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RT @therisingtithes
So I just saw Enola Holmes.

And I enjoyed it, too! I think it's fair to say that I am, as the Twitterers say, on the bandwagon.

But... and I say this quite timidly... is it fair to say I have a lot of bloody questions about the screenplay's politics when all's said and done?
https://twitter.com/therisingtithes/status/1310033975646326784

Hopefully, I've changed my Moa settings to better reflect that a.) I do still sadly spend more time on Twitter than Mastodon, and b.) I would still like to engage in conversation via both without followers feeling exposed to strangers.

Three recurring themes in my (prose) writing:

- art never wins the fight against broken systems but it is what reminds us to fight and makes fighting worthwhile
- all it takes to be good is to see a wrong and combat it
- monstrosity isn't what shape you take, but what you do
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RT @kierongillen
Three recurring themes in my writing:

- art will make you believe it can save you
- art is lying to you
- Kenickie were amazing https://…
https://twitter.com/kierongillen/status/1310303048233869313

Update: tonight’s session of ‘The Case of the Cindered Seal’ starts a little later at 8pm.

Don’t miss these Fugitives’ shenanigans this evening at http://twitch.tv/ArvanEleron!
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RT @speculatesf
"The Case of the Cindered Seal" returns this Sunday!

Starring @IoriKusano
@valerievaldes @thisismyDasein
and @MikeRUnderwood with @therisingtithes GMing

Join us at http://Twitch.tv/ArvanEleron this Sunday at 7pm Eastern US time.
https://twitter.com/speculatesf/status/1308478035470028801

I don't know why this gets me as much as it does, but you'd imagine even a fraction of this kind of bile would gurgle up for the same bitter, ruthlessly uncritical emerging youtube bubble dedicated to arguing that things are bad art because women enjoy them. IDK.

When someone says multiple times, "I wanted to like it, here are even the things I loved a lot about it, but here are my feelings, here is where I think my feelings meet reality--but FUCK ME if you enjoy the thing",

that person doesn't hate you. They *trust* you, IMO.

There are other media commentators on you tube dot com who are downright nasty and have no problem telling people to their face that their enjoyments and their thoughtfulness is a blight on art as aesthetic enterprise.
This is not that. This has even been tamer than judgment.

As someone eager to see Kubo's work return to the screen soon, I really appreciated this video.

But also, an aside:
how come some folks on twitter watched this video end with one of the healthiest sentiments about fandom critique and still think he *hates* Bleach or its fans?
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RT @EyePatchWolf
The Fall of Bleach: 4 Years Later

Turns out the true villain of Bleach… was me.

https://youtu.be/LbBgrSUPUH0
https://twitter.com/EyePatchWolf/status/1309841418840674305