Web weaving (often hyphenated to "web-weaving") is - along with the fanmix, the moodboard, and specific music - a genre of transformative works of art, endemic to the internet blogging website tumblr. A web weaving is any combination of images (such as of famous paintings), captured still images from film or television, prose quotes, song lyrics, lines of poetry, and excerpts from film scripts, which have a theme in common, or a unifying set of symbols, and which are presented together in a sequence to be enjoyed as a coherent single work of art.

Web weaving descends from two earlier tumblr transformative media micro-genres called "parallels" and "compilations." A "parallel" is a direct comparison, using captured stills, of two episodes from a show or two films from a franchise, depicting related themes, foreshadowed events, or events which "bookend" each other or demonstrate chiastic structure. A "compilation" is a grouping of text excerpts from books and poems by separate authors, with a theme in common. Both of these genres themselves descend from a prevailing meta-theme in tumblr's endemic transformative works, of beautiful or meaningful content being arranged in a collage or list based on a common theme.

The earliest user of the term "web weaving" for this exact context was the blogger Oumaima, author of the tumblr blog Douceurs and the Medium blog of the same name (which link cf. for the full text of its very earliest known instance of use). The following passage is the exact context of first use (emphasis mine).

"I have filled what little empty hours I have with images and song and poetry, weaving a web that rests upon tenderness itself, tending to the images growing within me. The web weaving is delicate work, spinning around one single idea the work of others and my own love, but they map roads towards one another."

The tumblr blogs Shensis and the (now defunct or relocated) Luxury of Tenderness feature the first instances of citing Oumaima as the primary source, although Luxury of Tenderness used the term in a post tag at least once prior to stating the credit to Oumaima.

Douceurs.tumblr.com postdates the first uses of the web weaving tag on tumblr, which was March 2019, and the post on Medium by Oumaima was from May of the same year, so it is likely that the actual first coinage of the term happened in a private chat or similar undocumented communication, and thus is not publicly discoverable. Between June and December 2019, the genre became codified into the form depicted here, and at the time of this writeup there are thousands of web weavings posted on tumblr, with the most successful weavings seeing upwards of ten thousand "reblogs" and "likes," making this an incredibly popular art form on tumblr. On 9 April 2017, the user sonnywortzik had coined the term "comparatives" for much smaller structures similar to web weaving, with other users such as Gay Icon Waluigi, Virgin Vengeance, and The Bluest Hour picking up the tag and using it for the same purpose later that year and in 2018. More recently, the "comparatives" tag has been used on the same posts as the "web weaving" tag, and the "parallels" tag has also been added to some of these posts, causing the distinction of meaning between the different types of post to erode, with web weavings being the dominant meaning.

Web weaving as a genre has several specific stylistic text and image formatting features, which nearly all current examples adhere to in their entirety:

  • A web weaving features a citation of sources at the end of the post. Content creators are presented in bold font and the titles of the source content are presented in italic font. Films are presented as a title and a year, with or without the name of the director included. Television series episodes are given by name, episode number, and season. Song titles are given with quotation marks around them, while book titles are not. Source citations are presented in the chronological order they appear as the reader scrolls down the web weaving itself, and not in alphabetical order. Source citations are separated by either one or two slashes (/ or //), with two being more popular in the past eight months, and with a full space before and after the slashes, for ease of reading. It is customary but not mandatory for the entire source citation to be in lowercase text. This formatting descends directly from the formatting used to list a series of music tracks in a fanmix.
  • A web weaving may feature multiple still images from the same film or show, but they are not placed directly sequentially adjacent to each other, and instead they are always separated by at least one passage of quoted text. Often these separating passages will be from the same one to three sources, interleaved with the still images, to create a "woven" effect. Stills are captured with the show's subtitles turned on, so that whatever is being spoken by the characters onscreen is presented in context.
  • A web weaving always features a minimum of two distinct sources of material. When the sources originate from the same author, songwriter, or director, they are classified strictly as "parallels" and are not considered a true web weaving. A web weaving always has text, but it does not always have images; if it has only images, it classifies as a "parallel" (or even a "moodboard") even if the images are from many sources. A web weaving always has, at minimum, at least as many text excerpts as images, and it usually has at least two more excerpts than images.
  • Quoted text in a web weaving is presented not in the form of actual text, which can be copied and pasted into a word processor, but as a screen-captured image of that text. In the case of song lyrics, they are usually captured from the website AZlyrics, which archives song lyrics from many sources. Text is always arranged so that dissimilar fonts are placed adjacent to each other, and it is customary but not mandatory for the web weaver to apply a coloured highlight over a specific section of the text which they consider especially important, or to impose black highlights over sections of the text to redact them. This is understood to be both an artistic choice and an attempt to cater to readers with difficulty parsing large passages of uniform text.
  • Web weaving never includes gifs or other mobile or animated content of any sort. It also never includes any audio media, such as attached music files.
  • Web weaving never includes visual fanart nor quotes from fanfiction. It also never includes images which are a nonspecific depiction of mundane things, such as landscape photography. Images are always either captured stills from screen media, captured text, or photographs of real-world pieces of original visual art, such as paintings which could be found in a museum.
  • A web weaving may or may not feature a title or a statement of what the unifying theme is intended to be. If there is a title, it will be listed immediately before the source citation. If there is a statement of theme, it will be listed among the tags on the post itself, meaning that the understood theme is not conserved in a successive reblog by another user, unless that user wishes to include the tag.
Web weaving also has a few points of etiquette which are not to be violated:
  • It is considered good etiquette to add a "read more" break below the source citation, followed by a complete copy in text format of the entire web weaving, including detailed image descriptions of all included still images, for the benefit of users who require text to speech screen readers to browse tumblr. This consideration ignores the fact that screen readers struggle with "read more" breaks, and the true reason for including the full text may well be to facilitate other users to save the quotes in their personal blogs and journals, through the greater ease of copying and pasting.
  • The length of a web weaving is a matter of etiquette. A web weaving has an unwritten expectation of how much "visual real estate" it will occupy (which is to say, how long it will take to scroll down through the entire weaving). It may have many sources, provided that they all are very compact and brief, or it may have few sources which take up considerable space. An excessively long source citation - anything beyond perhaps a dozen sources - is understood to be poor craftsmanship and somewhat rude to other users, while using fewer than four sources is broadly considered to be lazy on the part of the weaver, anticlimactic, and better classified as a "parallel."
  • It is considered grossly poor etiqutte to edit another user's web weaving, or to append any form of direct commentary onto it in a reblog. All commentary remains in the tags of successive reblogs, where the web weaver is assumed not to be likely to interact with them. It is acceptable etiquette to "recycle" parts of a web weaving, to use in a completely new formation that has a different unifying theme, but it is unacceptable to attempt to take many web weavings by independent weavers and fuse them together into one larger weaving on the theme they have in common.
  • A web weaving is considered facile if the unifying theme is a concrete idea, without any unifying abstraction as well. For example, a theme of "fire" alone is insufficient, but "fire as a symbol for freeing oneself from painful memories" is sufficient. Meanwhile, "fire as a symbol for seven otherwise unrelated things" would be regarded as extremely poor craftsmanship on the part of the weaver, due to a blatant misunderstanding of the source material.
  • A web weaving is also considered immature if the quoted section is taken wholly out of context, in contradiction of the themes or meaning of the entire source material. The weaver is expected to have real personal familiarity with the source material and its actual messages. For example, including "It was a pleasure to burn" in any capacity which depicts fire as a source of knowledge and higher truths (such as the Jessica Cluess quote, "Knowledge is as powerful as fire. The brighter it burns, the more it devours"), in obvious ignorance or rejection of Ray Bradbury's actual themes, would be extraordinarily gauche. The reason for finding it gauche, however, is not actually the ignorance itself, so much as the awkward and uncomfortable position in which the reader is put: it is the height of rudeness to directly comment on a web weaving, or to reply to it in any fashion, so the reader is obliged to swallow their discomfort at someone being wrong on the internet. They have no socially appropriate way to interact directly with the web weaving, much as it would be outré on Everything2 to post a writeup direct replying to someone's daylog writeup regarding events in their personal life offline, in an effort to be confrontational toward that noder.
  • Web weaving adheres to an unspoken but obvious content policy: images and rhetoric which express bigotry and prejudice against any race, gender, or orientation are never tolerated, and this rule extends to include seemingly progressive-sounding quotes from a body of work which is, in its entirety, overall an expression of bigotry (for example, a pro-LGBT-sounding line of text from a book which maligns the queer community would be unacceptable). Web weavers are held accountable for knowing whether or not the content they include comes from acceptable or reprehensible sources, and while it is still taboo to directly comment on a web weaving, a weaver who posts such content will find their blog "unfollowed" in waves, and their interactions with other users will become distant and frosty.

The following is a real example of a web weaving, posted Saturday, 17 October 2020, by the tumblr user Voirlvmer. The text formatting is a close emulation of the original web weaving, which presents the text in image format, using a different font for each quote. This example features no images, only text.



How can we live without our lives? How will we know it's us without our past? No. Leave it. Burn it.

I see the ashes falling out your window / There's someone in the mirror that you don't know / And everything was all wrong / So burn it till it's all gone

One night I burned the house I loved / It lit a perfect ring / In which I saw some weeds and stone / Beyond - not anything

We've practiced enough at grieving. Perhaps fire is right, let us burn everything and be done with it.

People have never had a problem disposing of the past when it gets too difficult. Flesh will burn, photos will burn, and memory, what is that?

"And if five times you ask yourself, / What am I doing here? set your bed on fire, / let it burn, and leave."

scorched earth theory

john steinbeck, from the grapes of wrath / agust d (ft. max), “burn it” / leonard cohen, from “one night I burned” / tjawangwa dema, from “in the house of mourning” / jeanette winterson, from oranges are not the only fruit / monica de la torre, from “conversions”

Tagged: compilations, web weaving, parallels, fire


What separates a web weaving from any arbitrary collage or list of quotes, is its deliberate emphasis on the connected ideas from many sources, existing in convergent evolution toward shared themes. Rather than the separate components of a web weaving being included for their individual beauty or significant meaning, the beauty of a web weaving is understood to be the connections themselves, and the way those connections are made observable for the viewer. The process of web weaving is treated as both somber - to be accomplished with great care and specificity - and playfully experimental, to bring fuller expression to themes of compassion, humanism, and the universality of life experiences. As such, even though web weaving does not necessarily make any explicit reference to Hermann Hesse or his magnum opus, it can easily be understood to be a real-world manifestation of The Glass Bead Game.

Iron Noder 2020, 3/30

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