Claudia Gray's Photo Blog

BAILEY’S 3K CELEBRATION —🔥(best of) + Luke Skywalker for @jediwill

“None of the stories people tell about me can change who I really am.” — Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Matthew Stover

A New York Evening - Dave Rheaume , 2016.

Canadian , b. 1963 -

Acrylic on canvas , 12 x 24 in.

Horse loves butt scratches

(via)

One of my absolute favorites. 😊

I love the American mind

World historical loser

Look at that face, lol. That girl was nailing the role.

Image description: a tweet by divinelydaria.

saw an inspiring video that said you need to have 4 hobbies.

create, consume, cavort, commune

create: bring something to life consume: appreciate the art of another cavort: move your body daily commune: have a community to socialize with

end image description.

I think you need hobbies that do all four things but the number of hobbies needed to cover all these needs may vary. Some hobbies pull double/triple duty. Some hobbies can cause repetitive stress injuries so it's good to have a few different ones that fulfill the same need so you can rotate to get the fulfillment without the carpal tunnel.

Tumblr really is aging.

This is true tho.

Misread this as 'you need to have 4 hobbits'

also true! there’s a really famous three-volume self-help guide about that!

unless all you’re doing is liberating a single mountain from a dragon, in which case you can probably get by with just one, so long as you also have a lot of dwarves.

The exchange rate is three dwarves to one hobbit, if anyone was wondering

And I get 4 dwarves and a wizard left over let's fucking go!

The Seven Hobbits of Highly Effective People

This went in directions unforetold.

how to say "I love you" in x-files [455/?] ⤷ 11.02 — "This"

paper and pen seems so powerful now. on account of all the. surveillance

Have said it before and will say it again: In the (near) future, the most secret/secure information will be kept only on paper.

late night reminder to self: your depressive episode will not last forever. it will have an end. tonight will not be the end of you.

Hey guess what i saw this a few days ago when i was in an absolutely scary slump and then i spoke to my counsellors and did what they told me to do and now i feel so much better. So this is true. Reblogging for more good luck

why is this so beautiful in like a space way

Because the essence of humanity and life as a whole is a constellation of connections with one another. We are all here in this cosmos together, from the tiniest creatures to the distant stars.

You're not alone.

you got lots of company, and you're gonna be okay 🫂

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

Other examples of “blamed for things their copycats did” include Watchmen (blamed for the gritty antihero comics of the 90s) and Madoka Magica (blamed for excessively edgy and grimdark magical girl shows).

Four years on, and I think you might be the first person to add this type of comment to this post. After receiving so many comments that are like “THG is nowhere near on the level of LotR” or “THG didn’t invent YA dystopia”, it’s so refreshing to see someone understand exactly what I meant by framing THG as “a work blamed for its copycats”, and expand on it with examples that I didn’t know about.

It’s so rare to get an original comment on this post. Thank you so much.

Jane Austen getting blamed for Pride & Prejudice copycats who both make Darcy worse and less reformed. Jane Austen told a beautiful story about mutual growth while others flatten it down into bantering enemies to lovers and sex pollen.

Maybe not exactly the same, but I feel like the imitations sometimes change people’s perceptions of the original too.

source

STRIP FOURTEEN of our Pride and Prejudice series. A new strip every Monday and Wednesday.

Darcy just needs a break.