What if you wanted to be KING but your niece and nephews were BASTARDS and your brother was GAY and STUPID and everyone HATED you and you couldn’t find a DENTIST for your teeth you ground down and a PRIESTESS told you to kill your DAUGHTER and a CLOWN was there
Why do people talk about how harrowing Watership Down was but never mention Cowslip's warren... There are a group of anthropomorphic rabbits in this children's fantasy novel that have accepted their role as living meat. They've convinced themselves that to kick and struggle is to defy the will of a god confined to the tortured ramblings of their poet caste, who beg for their throats to snap under shining wire as their kin look on in polite fascination. They speak with lobotomised tongues and shun their culture for that of their devourers, pushing stones into walls, digging agoraphobic atriums under which to sit in silence, awaiting a fate they are forbidden to name. Why don't we talk about this
if you read and enjoyed dr jekyll & mr hyde (or the glass scientists), frankenstein, dorian gray, etc—odds are you’ll enjoy a much lesser-known but just as good gothic novel called the private memoirs and confessions of a justified sinner.
you can look up a much better summary than i can provide, but it’s an amazing early exploration of religious extremism and the indoctrination of young people, the nature of free will, mental psychoses, and human identity. not to mention the author’s commentary on scotland’s national identity.
it utilizes the gothic doppelgänger trope and explores dual identities in a way that is completely different from jekyll & hyde or dorian gray. our irredeemable main character is a wet dying baby bird found in a mouldy cardboard box at the side of the road with delusions of grandeur and religious trauma. he makes victor frankenstein look downright self-aware in comparison. oh yeah and the devil is there too btw
i’m literally just begging someone to read it it actually changed my brain chemistry
(me gil-martining people into reading this book)
Being into gothic horror is wild, because you’ll look up the reviews/public opinion on a book and all the posts will be like “ugh, this was insufferable. The main character was the most melodramatic whiny narcissist cunt who’s perspective I’ve ever had the displeasure of following. When the main character wasn’t whining, it was just pages and pages of the most useless boring shit describing stupid landscapes over and over again. Boring and insufferable to read.”
And then you’ll get the book and read it and it’ll be like “Hi, I’m gothic protagonist. My entire family got brutally murdered by an unknown person and I also got horrifically abused as a child and struggle with severe mental illness, and now there’s unholy paranormal forces at work all against me, but at least I have the love of my life and my closest friends who I’d kill and die for and they’d do the same for me. Even though I’m cripplingly psychologically unwell and severely burdened with the mass of terrible things in my past, I’m going to figure out and track down the thing that killed my family and seek to destroy it, whilst poetically mirroring my suffering with the most beautiful and profound descriptions of the nature around me that you’ve ever read, contrasting the horror of nature with the beauty and goodness of it and giving you an existential crisis. This book is going to make you so ridiculously attached to these characters and change your whole perception of the life you lead.”
The output of the animation studio Spindle Horse has rapidly gone from the personal OC playspace of an enthusiastic animator to a merchandise-funded animation empire, attracting attention and financing from A24 and Amazon, besides doing millions and millions of views on YouTube.
Hazbin Hotel, the animated musical series that was picked up by Amazon Prime and which probably introduced a lot of people to the sensibilities of the studio's output, is in my opinion kind of a 7/10 sort of show, but it has attracted a fanbase that operates on K-pop stan levels of intensity. This is usually a pretty good sign that something interesting is going on artistically, so... let's have a look, I guess?