this is a love letter to isabel mostly idk 

demarches:

A hotelsongs le gusta tu set de fotos: hearthorne: ended over you and i. and i said…

i like this.

also isabel while i have you i’ve been thinking about physicality stanning, namely of you and physicality stanning since you, you know, came up with it, and i’ve come to realize that even though we are both obsessed with bodies we do it differently.  

like, you are obsessed with the interplay.  you are interested in the dance, in rotations, in the way people maneuver.  i’m interested in contact.  you’re more coiffed about it; i’m like omg hands.  this is, in general, the nature of us and fandom (read: life): you are coiffed, i’m like omg hands.

but i am pleased by this revelation because obviously i love your physicality problems but i felt like they were inadequate for me, like i was using the term wrong, because A: you are queen of the physicality stanning and you do it differently but also B: it didn’t seem apt.  i love a good dance too, obviously, but i feel like for you, and correct me if i’m wrong here, your interests are not just in physical contact.  it’s in the way in which that physical contact occurs or, notably, does not occur.  whereas i am like ‘omg but they’re touching’ and i end up having a lot of otp problems.

i was thinking about this in conjunction with that thing you said last week about how doing physicality stanning with a text is hard because you don’t have the physical bodies, you just have words, and i was talking to my thg thread about you as we do because k/g is like BODIES BODIES BODIES and i will one day flail at you over them but i also realized that they don’t dance.  they’re too easy together for that; it’s not a conscious act, there’s no rotation, it’s not part of any mirroring or dancing or push-pull.  it’s just contact.  pure, baseline, instinctive shit.  and i’ve been thinking about the use (and overuse, as we’ve discussed) of physicality stanning lately and i’ve realized that you use physicality in a way that is not just about the physical it’s about the act of being physical.  it’s about intention and performance of bodies, not just the mere way in which bodies exist together.  it’s about an interaction of bodies.  

and then lainey asked me for my top five tactile-oriented ships and i thought ‘yes.’  because i obviously love a good physicality ship too, but i’m starting to realize that physicality, in as much as the term was devised by, uh, you, is not what i’m talking about.  i’m interested in the things that are thoughtless, impulsive.  you’re interested in the intellectual, in the thought-through.  they’re different things.  yours has a very particular intent behind it and i feel like people who talk about physicality on the internets — myself included — have taken the word to mean something else.  and, like, obviously words take on meanings of their own but i like that physicality is your word, i like that you’ve taken over the internet with this phrase, and i feel like the original discourse of the term itself which i am obviously obsessed with forever means something different than the way in which it is often used.  because you created a vocabulary for something that did not exist beforehand, which is fucking stunning by the way, and now we need to talk about A: what physicality stanning/shipping actually means as the seed was originally meant to grow and B: come up with words that actually mean what we’re talking about.  so i have some ships that are about the interplay — kara/lee, mostly — but most of the time it’s about the mere act of touching.  i like the thoughtlessness; that’s something very important to me.  and i don’t have a word for that yet, but i’m going to come up with one.  because words are great and bodies are better and we should have lots of words to talk about the variety of ways in which they exist.

but i still think i can talk you into k/g anyway because bodies and the movie.

omg elyssa.

• i love you
• you wrote meta about me
• i’m obsessed with your existence
• (i liked that post because i love a good spiral and also embodiment themes*)
• yes

* aka: people being countries. people being movements, rebellions. icons who are people. i’ve been thinking about this a lot lately—caprica problems that are also helen of troy problems—and gosh, add that to the litany of I Wish The Hunger Games Was Adequate, because she’s the whole damn revolution. which in this case is a bad narrative trick, lol, but it doesn’t make it untrue.

but yes. your thing is tactility and mine is physicality and they are aspects of each other but not exclusive to each other. and—that’s ridiculously illuminating as to why we have so little ship overlap, even on the bodies scale. because you’re looking to hands that pull toward each other without looking and i’m looking at bodies that pull toward each other so forcibly that you can’t do anything but look.

Pardon me as I get all Art and Freedom and Politics on everyone 

demarches:

but this megaupload stuff is getting to me (like everyone else), feelings-wise, and I have a lot of political feelings on the subject and co-optation of politics and etc.  And this isn’t really my area of political expertise so if I’ve gotten any of my facts wrong, but let me just —

As anyone who’s been watching US politics for the last ten or twenty years can tell you, politics is now a business.  It has always been, but with the advent of new media (namely the proliferation of the television and the internet) the need to outspend the competition is absolutely critical to run a campaign.  Which means that politicians have to put up with activists and promises and Comcast in order to win.  There’s been a number of legislative changes in that regard which have actually loosened the restrictions on campaign finance.  When the Citizens United v. FEC decision came down, I remember sort of staring at the New York Times headline about it with this sense of shock and dismay.  I felt like we’d lost something.  And I still feel like we do.

But this isn’t about my rather virulent feelings on campaign finance reform and the interference of business in the day to day of the US government.  This is a post about access.  And I have always felt that the best thing about the internet is access; if there’s information out there, you can presumably get to it; if there’s someone you want to talk to, you can talk to them; if there’s art you want to access, you can get to it no matter your geographical location or economic status. Despite what people might try to suggest, television and movies aren’t mindless consumption; they’re art.  Sometimes they’re bad art, but they’re a product of a creative effort, and if that’s not art then I don’t have any clue what it is.  There is therefore something incredibly troubling to me about very wealthy organizations who contribute to campaign finance deciding that the priorities of the FBI is to limit access to art.  Perhaps that’s too bohemian of me.  I can’t say I care.

There’s something painfully appropriate to me about this coming off the back of the Occupy movements, which were undoubtedly some messy, messy politics and overall I’m ishy on it as a subject but I’m sitting here thinking about the rhetoric of a 1% dictating the political priorities of those that govern the 99%.  Catchy slogan, tends to stick.  But this post is so incredibly correct.  These are our priorities.  And the manpower that goes into something like the mere creation of SOPA, let alone shutting down websites and indicting those involved, is a giant waste of time.  It’s also coded in this language of theft and piracy which I think grossly oversimplifies the situation. 

First of all, the people who wanted this legislation already have plenty of money and I can’t imagine they’ll have much greater income from getting rid of stupid megaupload.  Second, to prioritize that political agenda over the actual truth of the situation — that a good deal of people who pirate are, you know, students and otherwise people who quite simply cannot afford all the dvd box sets in the world — is completely symptomatic of the current political arena.  Third, art should be paid for to support the artists, and all of the artists in question are already well supported by ad agencies and contracts and etc.  And finally, this isn’t politics anymore.  This is money running the show.  And I’m a political scientist, I love politics with every fiber of my being, and this isn’t politics.  Not to me.  While the more critical amongst us will say that politics and money are the easiest of bedfellows, I’m fundamentally uncomfortable with that essentialist linkage. 

Politics doesn’t mean the same thing to every person.  In fact, I’d venture that you’d find a different definition of politics for every person you’d ask.  Sure, the structural response is easy: politics is the government, the government is politics.  But politics is an everyday event; it lives in your grocery store, on your sidewalk, in your house, most certainly at art museums, and also on your television.  I can’t even define politics for you as I sit here next to my political science reading, because for me politics is pervasive.  But I can tell you what politics isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, and it should not be a mouthpiece for untethered corporate interests.  The unfortunate nature of the current political system in the US is that corporate interests are slowly but surely beginning to run the show to, I’d argue, an unprecedented extent.  And that’s not politics.  Politics is a discourse and a structural concept, yes, but also politics should be a verb, it’s an act of doing and making life happen for people, and presumably trying to make that life better.  Politics is not people with a lot of money getting to decide the priorities of this country.  But right now it is.  And to be honest, I don’t know how or if we’ll ever make our way out of that.

But the point I’m trying to make is thus: everything is political.  Unfortunately for us, dear internet, we aren’t holding any cards.  There aren’t even any cards for us to find and grasp between our fingers while gust winds try to blow them away.  Some would argue with that statement, and yes, maybe I’m being fatalistic.  But this is a matter far beyond the fact that I can no longer access season four of Battlestar Galactica and I’m pissed.  This is indicative of a broader trend that I don’t know how to stop.  I was watching MSNBC a couple weeks ago and the host was talking about how he wants to get money out of politics.  One could only dream.  But there’s something so transparently horrible to me about a political movement — and I am now convinced this is indeed a movement, just from people who, unlike us, have all the cards — that is about limiting access.  It’s about saying, we’re the victims and we don’t think that people who don’t have sufficient wealth or who don’t live in the United States should have access to our art.  So now we’re in a situation where both art and politics are owned by people who should not be defining those things, and I still don’t have any cards.

i appreciate your tags. we do have excellent taste in people; someone should study us. also i feel as though we had bonding times which i forever appreciate and it was beautiful!!!!!! tears 4ever see you next year ew.

except aforementioned next year is two weeks away so

hopesichord replied to your post: Fictional characters I quote the most often:

the fictional character i quote most often is jesus so

zing.

hopesichord:

hotelsongs:

itsinthetrees:

on my most recent rewatch i actually like physically spasmed during this part and made a happy sound while flailing my hands

i’ve become a shipping monster

hahahahaha yes.

(actually giggling irl too much at this. ELYSSA AND I ARE INFECTING YOU WITH OUR PATTERNS OF BEHAVIOR. flailing existence foreverrr.)

hahahahahaha i just said the same thing.

I would expect no less.

# you just learn from the best, c

(via demarches)

"

stanning is not letting a character get away with anything they way. stanning a character is being fixated on what they do and, perhaps most importantly, why they do it. stanning a character means when they do horrible shit you do not excuse it. you understand it. stanning a character means picking apart their foundations and their arcs and figuring out how and why they get from point a to point z. stanning a character means not shying away from the things that you wish you didn’t see. these characters are supposed to be human: they fuck up, they fall, the stab people in the back, they feel too much or too little and it makes them make all the wrong moves, they make excuses for their behavior, they are weak and they are strong. this is fiction; this is how it works. if our characters were perfect then they wouldn’t be interesting. the primary thing i have learned this year, which has been a stanning year if there ever was one, is that i am absolutely obsessed with narrative arcs about people who try to be better than they are. fandom, apparently, doesn’t like those people, because those people fuck up a lot, and they tend to be the heroes (no one likes the heroes; some shit about being whiny or whatever anyone who calls lee adama whiny needs to come talk to me) and fandom, from what i can gather anyway, doesn’t know what to do with heroes, because heroes, well-constructed anyway, fuck up a lot, feel too much when they’re expected to feel little, have this mission they don’t necessarily know how to balance on but feel compelled to balance on because of something that’s just inside them. i love those kinds of people. they are my favorite people.

fandom likes to box people up, to place them into good and evil and i have little care for such things. i study conflict for the same reasons i stan my heroes: there is good and bad in all of us and i am forever transfixed by trying to figure out where one starts and ends, and what makes that shift happen. this is also why i am forever fascinated by evil characters. because people are made evil. characters are made evil. sometimes being a conflict studies nerd makes my fandom life make a lot of sense.

so, anyway. stanning. i have a lot of problems with fen. i have a thousand different problems with fen. do not excuse these people and their behavior. understand their behavior. there is a significant difference. and when someone has issue with your kid, don’t get mad. back your views up. look, some people won’t listen. how many times must i explain angel to the internet before people start listening. probably a thousand. don’t care. because i love that boy. so i will talk about him for forever because i love him. fucked up complexes and emotional idiocy and dubious moral compass and flaws and all. i love characters like that. that’s what makes them human. that’s what interests me about characters, about fiction: these people, good or bad, should give us insight into what humanity means. the good and the very, very bad.

" — Elyssa, speaking to my soul (here)

hopesichord:

scottmoirtessavirtue:

fudgybar:

They shared their favorite part of every day…

    Scott: Skating with Tessa (laughs).        

    Tessa: Thank you.

(from CTS Television: Always Good News)

SO. CUTE.

GOD HE’S SO IN LOVE WITH HER AND SHE’S IN SUCH DENIAL ABOUT IT THIS IS WHAT I HAVE GATHERED FROM WATCHING TOO MANY SCOTT/TESSA INTERVIEWS/ROUTINES/VIDEOS SORRY KIDS YOU CAN CALL ALL OF HIS FAAAAACES ACTING ALL YOU WANT BUT I DON’T THINK SCOTT MOIR IS TAKING ACTING LESSONS ON THE SIDE AND I DON’T THINK FIGURE SKATERS ARE GENERALLY THAT GOOD AT FAKING IT I JUST ACCIDENTALLY TYPED SCOTT VIRTUE BECAUSE A GIRL CAN DREAM JUST FUCKING MAKE OUT ALREADY OH WAIT YOU ALMOST DID THAT ONE TIME MID-ROUTINE BECAUSE YOU’RE RIDICULOUS PEOPLE FOR FUCK’S SAKE TESSA WAKE UP.

THEIR LIVES ARE CONSTANTLY ON THE VERGE OF MAKEOUTS. THEIR LIPS TOUCH ALL THE TIME.

IT’S EXCESSIVE. AND BEAUTIFUL. AND THEY SHOULD WED OKAY THE END.

(via demarches)

hopesichord:

angelrewatch:

SUMMARY

When Angel tells Cordy and Doyle that he did not contact Buffy during his visit to Sunnydale, Buffy pays a visit and expresses her displeasure. Sparks fly. As they are about to part their separate ways, a medieval demon charges into Angel’s office and a violent brawl ensues. The demon escapes, and Buffy and Angel decideto pursue it separately. When Angel makes contact and kills him,he observes that he has human characteristics. The Powers thatBe confirm that Angel is indeed human again. Angel pursues Buffy and they share a passionate night of romance. But the next day, they are confronted by a stronger version of the medieval demon, and Angel is unable to fight in his human form. After hearingthat Buffy would perish if he were to remain human, he begs the Powers That Be to transform him into a vampire so that he can protect her. They do so, and Angel breaks the news to a heartbroken Buffy. However, their blessed reunion will remainonly in Angel’s memory…

-From Buffyworld

What was your favorite scene?
What was your least favorite scene?
What was your favorite line?
What line made you roll your eyes?
What would you change if you could?
Anything that just sticks in your craw?
Any fics that take place during this episode you’d like to rec?

OH OH OH OKAY.  LET’S GO BITCHES.  LET’S TALK ABOUT THIS SHIT.  CAPSLOCK ITT, RAGE ITT.

BECAUSE HERE’S THE THING.  I LOVE THIS EPISODE.  I LOVE THIS EPISODE.  BUT THIS EPISODE DOES NOT MEAN WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS.  IT IS UNDER THIS TAG WITH AMENDS, BECAUSE THIS FANDOM JUST LOOOVES TO MAKE EVERYTHING INVOLVING BUFFY AND ANGEL ABOUT BANGEL BUT GUESS WHAT KIDS, SOMETIMES THINGS ARE JUST.  ABOUT.  ANGEL.

But, um, actually, this episode is sort of about Bangel.  Sort of.  LOL JOKES C WUT I DID THAR.  I just wanted to put that rant out there.  This is an Amends Appreciation Brain.  Anyway.  This episode is about Bangel and it’s about Angel (but mostly about Angel let’s be honest); Sanctuary is just about Angel.  The two are oddly functional as continuous of the other, as part of the Faith narrative and as a continuation of this episode, but Sanctuary is also eleven episodes later, so by that point Angel, who never talks about anything, isn’t talking about this, this all-important, terrible, wonderful day, but he’s still thinking about it.  Fandom isn’t, but he is.  He is always thinking about it, until Sanctuary, I’d argue.  Best episode.  But that’s later.  The point is that this episode is this all-important moment in Angel’s personal narrative and it doesn’t get read that way, it gets read as OH, BUFFY/ANGEL, MY HEART, and, no, no, this episode doesn’t ship what you think it does.

This episode gets to me so thoroughly from an Angel perspective because s1 is about Angel finding a mission, a mission he lacked in Sunnydale entirely because in Sunnydale he fought because it was what Buffy expected of him and, more importantly, it’s what keeps Buffy alive.  His mission is keeping her alive.  That’s what pulls him out of that New York alley in the first place—”I want to help her,” he says.  She is his driving force for three years, and season one is, in a very quiet and largely unspoken but absolutely true sort of way, about Angel finding his mission as separate from her and that is why I love this episode, because this is a key moment.  This is when Angel says, “How can we be together if it costs you your life or the lives of others” (emphasis mine).  It is absolutely essential to note that this could cost Buffy her life and that he says this first, just as it is important to note that he then articulates his desire to save the lives of others, and from my recollection it’s really the first time Angel articulates the mission in that way.  It’s the separation from Buffy that gives him the mission consistently; that’s his narrative in s1, and this episode is a cornerstone of that arc.  His mission is not with her.  His mission is somewhere else.

So, honestly, this episode confuses me, not because of the text itself but because of the fan reaction to it.  This is read as this huge Buffy/Angel epic lovefest, but isn’t the entire point that B/A is an inevitable failure?  And Cordelia is, as always, entirely correct when she says, “Maybe it’s time you grew up and realized that you can’t have everything. You can’t have Angel and save the world.”  She can’t.  They cannot.  And he can’t have her and save the world.  They’re on totally different mission paths (qv Sanctuary).  To place them back in the same space is asinine.  This is an entire episode about that.  They are in two totally different places; the only way for them to be together is for one of them to lose the mission entirely.  That’s the entire point of this episode.  Their hero narratives don’t go together; their heroism cannot be circumscribed by romance.  They have other things to do.  That’s the point of this episode.  Not that they have a tragic love, but rather they have a tragic love that cannot be, and that moving on period is an extensive period, but this episode marks an absolutely essential part of that narrative.  This episode doesn’t ship what you think it does.

This is the episode that made me get the ship—precisely because I am nuts about deconstruction. (See: “Crush”, and its status as some of the shippiest shit I have ever seen.) This episode made this ship which I had never understood make sense to me, and it’s because it said goodbye. Shipwise, it put it in a box, put a stamp on it, and sent it off to be quarantined in Peru—and suddenly, knowing that it was contained like that and wasn’t going to come wafting back onto my TV at any point in the future, I could appreciate what it was and what it meant to these characters.

This episode is melodramatic. This episode is sappy. This episode makes excellent use of these components that I intensely dislike and fuses them into something focused and excellent, because this episode is about giving its hero everything he said/thought he ever wanted and him finding out that that wasn’t enough to live by. On the whole of BtVS, we saw Angel through the lens of Buffy’s POV, and as long as she was in his life, he saw himself through the lens of Buffy. He got his own show and at that point we as viewers see him as a full character with an actual emotional spectrum outside of her constraints, but he doesn’t have that privilege of watching himself. No, it takes this point for him to see himself as something permanently other than her. He has a place in the world, and she can’t be his world. They’re the heroes of their own stories, and those tales are going two different places.

This is a goodbye. He’s reaching further than her and she’s aimed in a direction past him. I can ship this ship for exactly one day, caught in memory and contained outside of the world and time. That I can do. Beyond that? We’re doing other things. The world is bigger than them—which was one of my major problems with the ship when it was a ship; there’s never been room in that relationship’s world for anything except their conceptions of each other; there’s never even been room for them as characters. Which is why I love that its resolution, its episode of self-contained in-a-perfect-world-this-is-what-we-get-to-have-together doesn’t work in the actual world. Ship predicated on fantasy and ideals from day one. This is 42 minutes of setting that ideal up against the real world—and the world, grey and sharp-edged and significant and broader than these people, comes out on top.

Bangel goes into a box. And scene.

(via demarches)

hopesichord:

mcqueens:

forestofveils:

mcqueens:

least fav line in great gatsby that every girl in my hs liked:

And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool

REAL TALK AMARA. Especially when watching the ’70s film version, the fact that it was just delivered so over-the-top should have signaled to people how fucking ridiculous Daisy was.

I just hate how people misinterpret actions & words of those who shouldn’t be viewed in a positive light (i.e. Wuthering Heights).

wuthering heights sends me into dizzying fits i cannot with that book

i know girls who LOVED HEATHCLIFF

LOVED

lol no, no love for heathcliff.

you know who i love though idgaf?

cathy.  evil, conniving, terrible bitch who ran that entire narrative.

i hate so many people who read that book though, because everyone reads it wrong.  aka stephanie meyer.  read the book wrong.  heathcliff is not your boyfriend.  heathcliff is a douche.  they were meant to be together forever in their evil, wreaking havoc and being terrible people who fucked with everyone they met, including each other.

it was going to be perfect.

and then stupid nelly dean didn’t tell her when heathcliff was eavesdropping and—

i can’t.  i know everyone else hates this book but i will love it forever.  favorite fucking book.  plz forgive me.

yes yes YES.

people getting wuthering heights right is an autoreblog. i love this book. i love you. listen to this, world; elyssa knows what’s up

(Source: tapesongs, via demarches)

Spike/Dru song for @hotelsongs 

hopesichord:

Barricade by Stars

Trapped on the terraces, I looked at you and knew
You were the only thing that mattered
There was no one for me but you
In Harmony Street we beat a man
Just for standing there
I held my breath as I watched you swing
Then run your fingers through your hair
Oh, how could anyone not love the terrible things you do?

We stalked the streets like animals
And danced as windows shattered
For the island, for the thrill of it
For everything that mattered

So this is perfect and I love you.

Result of this little music meme: I think I might end up making a post-NFA futureficmix. Oh.

(Source: demarches)

isabel. 20. machine woman problems. en passant
ASK & SUBMIT & INTRO & LJ

queens and huntsmen, physicality stanning, theater feelings, hilarious myopia, nonstop verbosity, delusions of grandeur. fictional moral compass not found.

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