Photoquai 2013: Evgenia Arbugaeva
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Russian soldiers witness the awakening of an elder god.
Why does this stuff always happen in Russia? What are they doing?
Reality decided that’s the only place where it can cut lose, considering they don’t seem to give a fuck about anything.
Photographer Tim Carter captured these adorable images of this Red Fox playing, stretching and sleeping in the snow.
This is my illo for the LGAL’s "In Place" exhibition (opening August 23th) and I chose Norway’s Hardangervidda. I was there with my family several times when I was young and loved the landscape and the calmness. I felt very free when we wandered through fjords and moss-covered places without any people. I do like spending my vacation in a city but hiking in Norway is the more relaxing and fullfilling thing for me. (And I adore the language!)
Prints are available here: http://lightgreyartlabshop.bigcartel.com/category/in-place
(Although there is still a wrong blue-ish preview picture in the store.It probably will be replaced later.)
![abandonedandurbex:
“Abandoned balcony overlooking the Alps in Italy [1367 x 2048]
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So on this hellsite people keep screaming about how romanticizing gross things in fiction is bad because it’s bad for impressionable people, or something. But there’s a nuance no one’s ever talked about here, which is that it is absolutely possible for a creator to romanticize something while explicitly condemning it in the text and making it seem like a bad idea.
If you’ve been exposed to American media at all, you’ve probably heard the Pina Colada song- you know, the one that goes “if you like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain” over and over and over again? It was in Shrek and Guardians of the Galaxy, among other things. It’s a song about a man trying to cheat on his wife by replying to a personals ad, and when he goes to meet his “new lover”, it turns out to be his wife! They have a laugh about the ridiculousness of the situation and discover that in however many years of marriage, they never knew some very simple things about each other. It’s implied that they stay together, due to their newfound shared enthusiasm for the most insipidly ‘relatable’ things the songwriter could put together to make the song as appealing to a wide audience spontaneous adventure.
I think we can all agree that this song is romanticizing cheating. The entire thing is played off like it’s a cute misunderstanding that just happened to bring this couple closer together. Instead of…. you know, a massive betrayal of trust.
But there’s another song- Kate Bush’s Babooshka- that handles a lot of the same ideas in a slightly different and interesting way.
Babooshka is a song about a woman who decides to test her husband’s faithfulness by sending him letters from a “secret admirer”. She signs the letters “Babooshka”. However, her husband falls in love with “Babooshka” because she reminds him of his wife before she got old and became… well, the sort of person who tests her husband’s faithfulness like that. Things get more and more exciting between the two of them, until they agree to meet in person and he declares his undying love for “Babooshka”. That’s where the song ends, but it’s implied that the wife doesn’t take it well- the song ends with the sound of breaking plates.
The very first stanza of the song says “[the wife] couldn’t have made a worse choice” than to “test” her husband’s loyalty. But Babooshka also romanticizes cheating.
How do I mean? Well, think about it like this. If you got a scented letter from a stranger who sounded eerily like your spouse, what would you do? Would you take it to your spouse? Would you assume that you had a stalker and act accordingly? Or would you pursue a torrid, passionate affair with this stranger, who clearly knows a lot about you?
The last option isn’t realistic. Awkward silences are realistic. Quiet consultations with divorce lawyers are realistic. Torrid affairs-by-letter with strangers are Romantic, with a capital R. It’s passion and colour and excitement, it’s not something that’s likely to happen in reality.
Romanticizing something doesn’t mean condoning it- but it doesn’t even mean portraying it as desireable within the world of the story. It just means making something look more exciting than it really is. Which… if we’re being honest, is about 90% of popular fiction.
I’ve never seen anyone in this debate bring this up. Everyone seems to conflate “romanticizing something” with “portraying it as desireable” and that’s…. just not it. That’s not how it works.
I wonder how this ties in with the whole thing in fandom where people are more invested in characters than they are in stories, which leads to this weird situation where fandoms totally love individual characters but hate everything else about the canon and would rather just watch the characters hang out or go grocery shopping or whatever? (This is also the impulse behind “protect [fictional character] at all costs” sentiments.) Because usually bad things happen in stories, but that, traditionally, is what makes the stories interesting. If you don’t care about that, or actively dislike it, I guess I could see not distinguishing between things portrayed as desirable in-story and things not portrayed as desirable…
smeliot