From Within A Semiburnt Diary
Added 2024-05-23 22:05:57 +0000 UTCThis is an idea I came up with during my bout of tendinosis, which I thought was a solid idea, but which, given the tone and subject matter, I couldn't really bring myself to work too hard on, given how depressed I already was. The story was dusted off a couple months later after an opportunity came up to collaborate with an artist mutual of mine-- the script you see here was, originally, meant to accompany several pages of visuals. That is to say, it went from short story, to comic book, and then back to short story when the collaboration fell through (no hard feelings-- I think its reasonable to expect something a little funnier to work on, coming from me). Does the writing structure still hold up?
It's beyond old hat, at this point, to point out how sexist the knight in shining armor trope is, but I'd like to think the work here has a little more to it than that. That being said, I don't really want to say anything else about the story-- rather, I'd like to hear what everyone else makes of it. This is, obviously, not my usual style of work, but rest assured, the funnies will resume shortly.
Thanks everyone. Be well.
Comments
I've been reading and taking a class on the Orlando Furioso, which also engages with the autonomy of princesses (or rather women in general) in chivalric texts, especially as compared to the knights who seek them out, so this short story came as a nice coincidental surprise to me. I'd almost go as far as to recommend checking the Furioso out, though it's a super long read—however, I have been surprised at how entertaining it's been, from a modern perspective (it was written in the 1500s, and even at that, the translation I'm reading was written in the 1970s). This is partially due to the fact that it seems to be *filled* with a bunch of anime tropes—one of the main characters is shockingly similar to the kind of annoying pervy protagonist you'd see in a modern fantasy anime. Though now I'm just talking about the Orlando Furioso—to relate back to the topic at hand, though, the line "desperate, lonely people, with nothing left to lose" really reminded me of one of the high points of the story, where the titular Orlando goes Evangelion Berserk, strips off all of his clothes, and starts ripping trees out of the ground with his bare hands and violently killing innocent people (this is all because he discovered the woman he loves fell in love with a different guy). I've gone on long enough, though, describing parts of the story.
Jack Burns
2024-05-23 23:54:18 +0000 UTC
