• she/her, they/them, sie/sie/ir, ask

dyke, poetess, games writer, &cet.

wow! this lesbian can pierce space and time!


if you can see this,
you have permission to message me on discord

"you couldn't make Blazing Saddles today" "you couldn't make Ace Ventura today"

You know what you absolutely could make today? Dante's Inferno. Like, if Dante lived in the 2000s, and wrote about how Donald Trump and Ajit Pai and Putin and the evil puriteens were all in hell. This might seem strange-- people already joke about the Inferno being a Tumblrbrained self-insert bathroom-trashing power fantasy, and surely it would be lauded as "cringe" today.

But the beating heart of the Inferno-- the episodic ironic punishment of people Dante didn't like-- is simply too appealing. People suspended their principles to laugh when someone said Andrew Tate's dick was tiny, and "Andrew Tate is in hell being eternally mocked for his teeny pipi" is just the literary way of doing that. The "Drumpf" joke lasted years, with the original justification being that Oliver was reflecting Trump's mockery of immigrants back upon him. God only knows what present-day Dante would have said about the other mainstream villains of the past year (puriteens? the "outside instigators / looters and rioters"? oh dear god dante would absolutely have described will smith being slapped by imps forever).

Ironic punishment is so appealing, so ingrained. Calling it a "literary device" hides how it's the sister concept to shaming people for perceived hypocrisy. How do you justify laughing at someone being hoisted by a completely unrelated petard? You rewrite the story. It's their petard now, it always was.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @bigstuffedcat's post: