Instead of apologizing for liking "trashy" media, consider: what is it doing well? If you like it, if it's making you feel pleasure and interest, then it must be succeeding at something. Is it shaping a set of emotional beats that you find satisfying to watch play out? Did it craft a character you find really compelling? Is something in the styling and aesthetics speaking to you? Did it unexpectedly resonate with a mood or experience you needed to see reflected right then?
However shallow or flawed a piece of media is, if you like it, it's because of something it did well - at least well enough to affect you, on the day that you encountered it.
There are a lot of good reasons to acknowledge this. One is about gratitude and manners: someone worked hard on that thing, and if they provided something that gave you happiness and pleasure, it's nice to honor that. Another is about breaking down the insidious habit of sorting everything into simple good/bad boxes. A piece of media, like a person, can do a lot of things wrong and a lot of things right, and the things on one side do not magically erase the other.
But the most important reason, I believe, is to get in the habit of celebrating what brings you pleasure and happiness. All your life there have been and there will be people telling you that you find joy in the wrong things, that if a particular thing makes you feel good it shows that there's something wrong with you. I reject that utterly. If a particular thing makes you feel good then there's something right, about you and about that thing. I'm not saying that pleasure is the only important thing or that every pleasure should be indulged indiscriminately. All I'm saying is that pleasure is in and of itself a good thing, and deserves notice.
Please make art. You don't have to bare your soul or make a masterpiece, you can be silly and you can be derivative if you want. You don't even have to show it to anyone. Just please make something, it's so good for you
If you're ever worried about whether your writing is too self indulgent, I just want you to remember that Sharknado had 5 sequels. I'm only partway through watching Sharknado 6: It's About Time, but already they've traveled through time and ridden a pteronadon into a Sharknado so they could use the magic teleportation portal inside of it to travel forward in time to King Arthur's time, where they are currently battling a Sharknado full of fire-breathing dragon sharks with Excalibur, which is a chainsaw sword that calls lightning. You're fine. In fact, be a little more self indulgent if anything.
My uncle is autistic so he has sensory sensitivities, and he's largely nonverbal so he can't tell you what those sensitivities Are, so what he does is, if you give him a shirt that is a bad texture, he goes and gets his scissors and he cuts it into tiny little pieces so no one can ever ask him to wear it ever again, and the thing is is that he is so totally right
Above image is a pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.
sorry I say weird shit sometimes I’m just so excited to be alive
Official: We’re looking for a dangerous fugitive from the Dynasty by the name of Essek Thelyss, have you seen him recently?
Caleb: I’m sure I don’t know who you’re talking about
Essek, hiding under the table: *using mage hand to rotate all the jars labelled “Essek” to hide his name whenever the officer glances away*
putting bg3 point and click voicelines together to sound like a conversation has brought me great joy, so. here's gale, karlach, shadowheart, and astarion doing a terrible job of sneaking around
The Flame
Workin on OC character designs! (Some of these are already outdated lol, but I’m still proud of them)
Xe/they/she/he || bisexual disaster || artist, writer, and neurodivergent lover of stories || expect Critical Role, TMA, and my various other hyperfixations
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