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The history of corporate propaganda.

'Nobody wants to work' fails to mention the poverty wages and horrible workplaces.

Reframe the narrative: Capitalists refuse to pay thriving wages.

How can anyone just read books? I can’t concentrate for an entire chapter. I just get distracted after 2 minutes :/

@morethanfantasy i’m in the airport and i have a few ophelia thoughts left rattling around in my skull so let’s do this

i think the thing that makes ophelia so fascinating to me out of all the characters in hamlet is that we never really get to see what she’s thinking. every scene she’s in, every interaction she has, is colored in a certain level of uncertainty, because the complicated power dynamics involved mean it’s hard to tell what’s genuine and what’s a carefully curated persona to survive in elsinore. take her first scene with polonius. i’ve played it several different ways in the past: she’s genuinely confused about hamlet and wants his advice, she’s fully in love but he’s kinda talking her out of it, she’s rolling her eyes behind his back… we don’t actually ever get her take on this scene, so textually any of them could be a correct read.

The only time that Ophelia speaks directly to the audience and not to another character is directly after the nunnery scene. Hamlet runs out and Ophelia spends a few lines lamenting his change (lines that tell us a lot about the previous dynamics at elsinore and i think could be incorporated into design and directing choices a lot more), and then Polonius and Claudius leave their hiding place and discuss what to do next.

While this monologue could be read as Ophelia telling us her true feelings, I have two problems with that. First: she doesn’t? really? say anything?? don’t get me wrong, hamlet being the rose of elsinore’s court is fascinating, but it doesn’t tell us anything about how ophelia feels. it doesn’t tell us if she loves him, if she stopped loving him, if they’ve had sex and she’s freaking out cause now he’s said that he’ll never marry her (something that she may well be thinking based on the mad scenes). even when talking to the audience, she’s putting up a bit of a front. she’s telling us much less than we think she is.

Second (and this may explain the first): the entire conceit of this scene is that ophelia is being observed. claudius and polonius are watching from hiding the whole time, and while hamlet may or may not know that, ophelia is perfectly aware of it the whole time. she’s still performing because she’s still being watched. she can’t scream in anger or punch the wall or laugh hysterically or respond with any genuine emotional reaction because she’s still under her father and the king’s censorious eyes. It’s appropriate. The one time ophelia seems to speak her own thoughts, and she’s not really alone, just pretending to be, in front of the most powerful people in the world. hamlet may be fucking around with metatheatricality, but ophelia’s the one who’s really on a stage.

a lot of shakespeare plays have characters that never really talk to the audience directly. it’s normal. but it would be a very different experience if we never knew what juliet was feeling, or whether regan truly loved her father, or if malcolm wanted his country back. and it’s especially fascinating that we have this inscrutable character here, in the introspection play! i’d argue that we can tell what pretty much any of the other characters are feeling based on genuine conversations and monologues, which makes ophelia a fascinating foil to the obsessively introspective hamlet. how much different would the story be if the perspectives were flipped, if we got ophelia’s thoughts and not hamlet’s? would her inner monologue look like his or something completely different? i could spend YEARS trying to develop a coherent idea of ophelia’s psyche and i’d never know if it’s true.

and of COURSE that expresses itself in ophelia’s madness. hamlet makes jokes and puns and messes with his clothes and acts like he’s smarter than everyone else. ophelia starts fully speaking in code. you need 5 layers of context, some of which is known only by her, to follow what she’s saying. it does seem like it all has a meaning, though. my read on it is that for the first time in her life ophelia is able to say exactly what she thinks, without couching it in politics or politeness, by using songs and references and obliqueness so that none of the people around her have any idea what she’s saying to their faces. is that intentional on her part? up to interpretation. she might have truly been driven mad by grief and fear and powerlessness and this is the only way she can make sense of the world now. she may have simply decided to quit the power games of elsinore and is entirely lucid. (side note, it’s definitely relevant that scholars have been having the is-the-madness-real discussion about both hamlet and ophelia for ages. more parallels!) the point is, we’ll never know. we’ll never know if her death was a suicide, an accident, or a murder. in a play where we know everything about hamlet, we know next to nothing about ophelia.

personally, i think that tells us quite a lot. hamlet has some fascinating power dynamics, and the fact that even the structure of the play gives hamlet freedom to express himself at length while taking away ophelia’s voice is a clever way to show their positions in elsinore and the way that the social structure traps characters in the narrative. it also shows us our own blind spots as an audience, if we’re willing to see them. while the play is all too willing to show us the story of hamlet, there’s another story going on that it does its best to obscure from us. by the time we see that something invisible is going on with ophelia, it’s too late. it’s the mad scene and she’s already gone.

Reason to Live #2402

 So I can continue to make art and maybe make something that has a genuine impact on the world. – Guest Submission

(Please don’t add negative comments to these posts.)

guillermo de la cruz is literally THE most character of all time. hes gay. hes latino. hes fat. hes badass. hes sexy. hes a serial killer. hes a mamas boy. hes insane. hes the most normal one here. hes by birth and lineage a vampire killer. hes spent 13 years trying to become a vampire. hes my best friend hes my pal, my homeboy, my rotten soldier, hes my sweet cheese my good time boy

Dont mind me just using tumblr to save mildly spicy art

shakespeare plays need fandoms. like real, actual fandoms, not just 13 people on tumblr. i want people to make velocity edits of this favs. i want angsty hamlet edits to exist. i want viola x orsino and viola x olivia ship wars to exist. i want chronically online tiktokers to fight over this shit. i would pay real money to see people to make AUs on ao3 where the most unhinged ships who have never met to become canon. i want really poorly written romeo and juliet fanfics to happen. someone please help me make this dream a reality

alive can i have new podcast recs please i want new podcast recs please please can i have new podcast recs please horror and also gay

so tma ended, now what? horror podcast recommendation list part 3 oh my god they made more of these things

malevolent - i think people are already turned on to this one because its slowly becoming the new big thing imo. malevolent is about a guy named arthur who fucked up and got his eyes stolen by an eldritch abomination that is also now physically tethered to him and they dont like each other enough to just live like that so they go on an adventure to try and unstick themselves from each other. its a lovecraftian mythos story, so thats the type of horror you're getting. it's not a comedy and its not a romance but it both is a comedy and is a romance you know what i mean? 10/10 can you believe its just one guy doing all of these voices

red valley - red valley is about a guy named warden who works in a weird government agency tasked with trying to find a seed vault that very quickly becomes not a regular seed vault. the characters in this one are all so well written and the gut punches kill me. this is a bit more near future(ish) scifi than regular horror, but while you're listening to it turn into a road trip you're going to be like "alive this isn't scary" and right around that time is when they're going to introduce truly what is one of the most fucked up concepts i've ever heard. 10/10 the british people made me cry again

out of place - okay so stop me if you've heard this one before. there's a british guy working in an archive where he gets weird kind of scary things and his archive institution is shady and there are tapes and its not mag again i swear. out of place starts much the same but instead of getting scary bullshit, andrew starts receiving historical artifacts from different alternate history realities. its fantastic world building, good story telling, and just like. existential dread nightmare after existential dread nightmare. 10/10 i can't listen to this in the grocery story because i will just stare of into space and sigh for twenty minutes at a time.

they're all ongoing and at around 20ish episodes right now and i love them. i only do these rec posts when i can find at least three shows so sorry for how long this ask took to get to <3