formerly @stedestiel

yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine

The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.

So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.

Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.

Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.

That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.

I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop

i met a scholar once who said that tragedies aren’t about a silly “flaw” or anything, it’s about having a hero who’s just in the wrong goddamn story

if hamlet swapped places with othello he wouldn’t be duped by any of iago’s shit, he’d sit down & have a good think & actually examine the facts before taking action. meanwhile in denmark, othello would have killed claudius before act 2 could even start. but instead nope, they’re both in situations where their greatest strengths are totally useless and now we’ve got all these bodies to bury.

The tropes are hungry and the hero is in the wrong goddamn story.

I love this post.

Feels

I believe the artist is Katy Doughty.  

Here’s a link to Katy’s tumblr!

This is half an MFA right here.

The tropes are always hungry and the tragic hero is just somebody trapped in the wrong damn story.

“The tropes are always hungry and the hero is trapped in the wrong story.” is a phrase I want made into a gorgeously designed giant poster I can hang on the wall.

@shitpostsampler

I had a very interesting discussion about theater and film the other day. My parents and I were talking about Little Shop of Horrors and, specifically, about the ending of the musical versus the ending of the (1986) movie. In the musical, the story ends with the main characters getting eaten by the plant and everybody dying. The movie was originally going to end the same way, but audience reactions were so negative that they were forced to shoot a happy ending where the plant is destroyed and the main characters survive. Frank Oz, who directed the movie, later said something I think is very interesting:

That’s a real gem of a thought in and of itself, a really interesting consequence of the fact that theater is alive in a way that film isn’t. A stage play always ends with a tangible reminder that it’s all just fiction, just a performance, and this serves to gently return the audience to the real world. Movies don’t have that, which really changes the way you’re affected by the story’s conclusion. Neat!

But here’s what’s really cool: I asked my dad (who is a dramaturge) what he had to say about it, and he pointed out that there is actually an equivalent technique in film: the blooper reel. When a movie plays bloopers while the credits are rolling, it’s accomplishing the exact same thing: it reminds you that the characters are actually just played by actors, who are alive and well and probably having a lot of fun, even if the fictional characters suffered. How cool is that!?

Now I’m really fascinated by the possibility of using bloopers to lessen the impact of a tragic ending in a tragicomedy…

how many elizabethan people do we think spontaneously realized they were lgbt after watching twelfth night be performed

imagine being a repressed teenager in 1602 and going to the theatre to see the new play that's being put on and it's about a love triangle between a man, a woman, and a woman disguised as a man who both the man and the woman fall in love with, and because it's elizabethan england both the woman and the woman disguised as a man are played by young men. I would have turned transgender on the spot I think