songs of a girl who typed all this into a bright white text editor and wants to cry because it triggered a migraine even though i knew better:
2/23/2026
Something I love about gothic literature (and goth/gothic things by extension) is that it allows for so much more than what people think it does. At its heart its about the chasing of fantasy through a lens of pure intellect and curiosity rather than just entertainment. We can get so many good works from any era, the only real thing you need to make something a Gothic is just a person going through it or getting changed in some way. The genre is inherently shifted towards the side of melodrama and extreme tragedy, but you don't even need that, depending on the story.
My stories are based mostly out of Poe straight up, combined with some miscellaneous influences. A lot more things are gothic or gothic-lite than they seem! What snagged me though is the triple influence of reading Watership Down followed by Velveteen Rabbit in a Catholic high school, all as a freshman. If you read my last blogs, you'd know I also deal with so much (not even counting the VAST amount of animal and human deaths in my life I've seen... we literally live in front of a small church graveyard where some of our family/family friends are buried...)
I think I liked to read in high school, too. I, (un?)fortunately was one of the only people who read the books, so I read Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, etc. My favorite out of school reads at the time were things like Flowers for Algernon (I loved that book, really), and my most useful short story I read my senior year was A Rose for Emily. There's a lot more, but I don't know what I could say... like Gatsby? I read Gatsby, it's actually very good. Right now, as of today, I started finally reading Dorian Gray, too. Before that I was reading Wuthering Heights, but I put that on pause to read over my break... I love the drama and all (Emily Bronte was a GENIUS, she would have loved me), but it's so vocabulary dense that I need to wait for some free time.
Aside from that, I also have to give it up to my fellow fandom enjoyers on AO3, they made some crazy things that I will not be letting you know. Although I'm a huge fan of the Yakuza 4 fic by o_BloodyRose_o titled Tomato Red, that shit was peak and I downloaded it for my ebook reader to preserve it. I'll let the 'never reads smut' mask slip for once just to recommend it because I adore AkiTani (secretly) for the dynamic and this is my baseline for what it's like.
I don't remember how this relates to my orignal sentence, but that's my experience, anyway. I have no idea what happened to me, I'll be honest. I was out there being an Emily Windsnap girl and in the next life I'm a Wuthering Heights enjoyer. I used to read all the time as a kid, but my family stopped bringing me to the library for whatever reason. I started reading at age 2, maybe I was born to be a writer, I don't know. Or maybe I'm just the biggest nerd lol
Anyway, out of everything I read, I really think I can say that fanfics and original books/works inspired by fandoms & pop-culture media are infinitely better than other books... Like 1984 was really good, with it being deeply fatalist as a warning against the setting, but I read this crazy fic where Kiryu just beat up a quadrillionaire with the Lorax and I felt that... I got the message and I think about that a lot. Meanwhile, I read Poe's Usher and what, incest? (joking btw I love that story)
Ultimately the reason I write is I want to be able to explore the worst and the rawest of humanity, the deepest suffering that my mind can conjure through my special somatic method. I'm positive this is where my paranoia comes from but you know? We ball, it's ok.
I'm only ending this post here because I can't think of anything else to say (and my head hurts), so I'll most likely make a part two at some point that actually stays on topic. (not a promise)