fantasylandandocean

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rebloging beautiful people

I refuse to believe that Adora did anything else in her room when she had the sword

Reblogs are 👌🏽

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Greek girls dancing in traditional costumes, probably from Thrace. Photo by Jim Mourgos.

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Traditional Corfiot Greek costume by Stamatis Katapodis Photography.

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yes!

💖💜💙What a great day to remember that bi aces are absolutely beautiful! 💖💜💙

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Rebloging beautiful people

Mina Orfanou

Gender: Transgender woman

Sexuality: N/A 

DOB: 3 May 1982  

Ethnicity: Greek

Occupation: Actress

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A 7.0 erthquake hit Turkey and Greece , resulting in the collapse of at least 30 buildings in the Turkish city Izmir. As of now 12 people died and over 400 are injured. People are still trapped under the rubble. The earthquake also hit the eastern Aegean Sea island of Samos, Greece where two teenagers were killed. It also triggered a mini-tsunami that flooded some parts of Izmir and Samos.

My heart and prayers go out to everyone affected by the earthquake & tsunami 💔

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Yeah, I’ ve seen it a lot lately.. :-/ And it is a mess. I do hate how Kylo/Reylo fans keep disminsihing Palpatine’s abuse of Anakin or Anakin’s slave background in order to prove that Anakin’s fall was due to his internal evilness in contract to Ben. With that been said, Anakin fans are not innocent on this. When TFA first came out a lot of Anakin fans wrote Ben off as a “privileged”, “spoiled” brat, an MRA, a school shooter, an incel and anything that one throws in fictional characters they don’t like as a way of bullying their fans. They totally dismished any possibility of Ben being a result of trauma and abuse and they acted as if the only vialable options was that either Ben was a bad seed or that Han, Luke and Leia were terrible abusive parents. There was no third option, the possibility of the BIG 3 doing any mistake was unacceptable. The possibilty of an outside influence that the BIG 3 overlooked was unnacceptable. I think a lot of the dismishal of Anakin’s trauma is an answer to that early treatment by some Anakin fans.

On the other hand Ben fans seem to be trying to go point by point on Anakin’s and Ben’s narratives in order to analyse the differences and come up with all kind of reasons why Anakin was just a naughty, greedy child that had it easy compared to Ben. Anakin had a happy childhood because his mother loved him - nevermind his slave status or how he was forbidden contact with her after becoming a Padawan. Nevermind that Ben’s parents and uncle also loved him. An that’s the problem: Ben’s parents weren’t perfect and were also gaslighted by his abuser but they loved him. Han and Leia are not the bad parents to Shmi’s good parent. Their mistakes are not the equivalent to Shmi’s perfect parenting and the story is not about that.

Anyway, it’s all in vain now :((( TROS managed to redeem Ben, make Reylo canon AND BREAK THE MYTH ugh!!!

Kylo Ren/Ben Solo is one of my favorite characters, but i don’t like how Kylo/Reylo fans diminishes Anakin’s story.

“Kylo is different from Vader, he will go from Kylo Ren to Ben Solo, from the dark to the light.”

Yeah, it’s like Vader never redeemed himself in ROTJ .-. Both were seduced by Palpatine/Snoke and both redeemed himself (yes, Kylo of course will redeem himself). Both were groomed and gaslighted.

“Anakin loved the girl until he wanted the power”.

Guys….Anakin wanted the power to save the girl. Anakin didn’t desire power for the sake of it. In the comics, he also tried to resurrect Padme.

Anakin didn’t stop loving Padme, you know. He always loved her.

Anakin failed to save Padme but he saved his children. If Ben is going to die (i hope no, but we’ll see), the only difference with Vader is that Anakin sacrificed himself for Luke while Ben sacrificed himself for Rey. But i hope he will get a happy ending. Ben is the last Skywalker.

Vader and Kylo Ren are not so different. Their story is a tragedy.

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Just beautiful

🐺 by J. Marriott

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I thought I’d answer this as a picture to make it easier and keep it together.

Basically… yes. All of this.

People love to chant “just because Snape loved Lily doesn’t mean he’s redeemed!” when that wasn’t why he was redeemed. He was redeemed because of the amount of risk he put himself under to save the lives of people that had nothing to do with him, Lily, etc. 

Then in the same breath they say “Oh James bullied while he was at school but he loved Lily and Lily loved him!” when he tried to threaten her into a relationship, threatened to physically harm her and sexually assaulted Severus.

In my mind, that’s far worse than blurting out “mudblood” in a moment of frustration because you thought your closest friend was laughing at your sexual assault.

Also, he didn’t really stop hexing people. He joined the order, but Sirius reveals in the Order of the Phoenix that he continued doing it, just when Lily wasn’t around.

James bullied because he enjoyed the power rush hurting and sexually assaulting people gave him.

Severus bullied because it was his way with coping with the abuse he suffered as a child at home AND at Hogwarts. Basically he wasn’t safe ANYWHERE.

Yes, I know Severus’ bullying was wrong but think about it. After years of torment would you come above what he did? I couldn’t, giving the odd detention and making the odd harsh comment really is minuscule compared to say, Umbridge, who again, did it because she enjoyed it. Severus was coping with abuse.

Really though, all in all if you say love doesn’t redeem Severus (when clearly in the book and here it was stated that that wasn’t what redeemed him, just what inspired him to turn to the good side) whilst saying that James was redeemed because he stopped (when he didn’t) and because he and Lily loved each other then you really need to sort out your priorities.

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I think is because we have so little of J*ly in canon. There are also no positive interractions in the little we have. It is not uncommon for background characters whose story took place in a different time than the heroes to have limited screen time but the fact is, JK could have chosen to show j*ly as a loving relationship in one or twoo scenes. Instead we only get antagonism and then they are only framed as Harry’s parents -in relation to their son- but never as a couple -in relation to each other  (if I remember correctly, I am re-reading the series and I am only in book 2). 

People go on about Snape harassing Lily when she was “obviously interested in someone else” when if you actually read the fucking books then you’d see James tries to threaten her with physical violence into a date while Severus “looking at Lily intensely” makes her blush.

Right.

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True, genuine love and friendship do not equate obssession. Snape was a very damaged person but the love he had for Lily was genuine.

I saw your text post saying that snape wasn't obsessed with lily and just wondered if you could explain why you think that? I disagree and so I'm interested to hear your thoughts about it

Severus being obsessed with Lily is a topic/argument that often comes up when people are trying to demonise Severus but it’s absolutely fanon.

So there’s this whole idea that Severus was this creepy, obsessed guy that wasn’t able to get over rejection and as a result of that spent the rest of his life lusting after a dead woman.

This is a horribly wrong, rather cruel and even slightly corruption of his character and especially the message that J.K Rowling was trying to present.

First of all, “lusted after” can be immediately thrown out the window. There’s nothing to suggest that Severus’ love for Lily was sexual. Severus lives a life of celibacy, and doesn’t demonstrate any behaviour that can indicate sexual attraction or lust. It really bothers me when anti-Severus people try to go on about how he “wanted to bone Lily”. Loving someone doesn’t equate to Severus, and I think the fact that these people equate loving a woman immediately to wanting to have sex with her says a lot about their attitudes towards love and loving women. Severus wasn’t a particularly sexual person at all.

Secondly, the idea of the “rejected person that can’t get over the fact she wasn’t interested” needs to stop. This implies creating shrines, staring at pictures of her, not being able to deal with her loving someone else. Again, this is all fanon, not canon and really has no basis at all. You know why? Because Lily never rejected Severus. The only person she rejects in canon is James. Throughout the book they only ever have a friendship, and after Severus calls her a mudblood, she tells him to leave her alone. There isn’t this kind of ’ “please go out with me Lily” then getting angry and not being able to accept it when she says no’ mindset that so many people think that Severus had. He never asked Lily to be his girlfriend, he never even told Lily that he had feelings for her. In fact, it’s never actually explicitly stated that his love for her is romantic, it’s just implied, so I don’t see how he can be this guy who just “can’t accept that she rejected him.”

His only words when she asked him to leave were “I thought we were friends. Best friends.”

Also, let’s bare in mind that the doe was his patronus. The definition of a patronus is “This ancient and mysterious charm conjures a magical guardian, a projection of all your most positive feelings“ and the definition of obsession is “compulsive preoccupation with a fixed idea or an unwanted feeling or emotion, often accompanied by symptoms of anxiety.”

Obsession (especially creepy/unhealthy obsession as most people put it) is a very negative feeling, so I doubt it would have been a patronus. I’ve written before about Severus’ patronus and what it means here if you’d like to read more. Overall, the point is that the patronus is a beautiful, positive thing. If Severus was unhealthily obsessed he wouldn’t have been able to conjure the patronus.

Let’s bare in mind the dialogue between Dumbledore and Severus.

Dumbledore: Lily? After all this time?Severus: Always.

Severus always loved her, this doesn’t mean he was always obsessed. If he were consumed with this unhealthy obsession then it definitely wouldn’t have come as a shock to Dumbledore who spent so much time with Severus. 

Now, this is going to get a bit personal but I feel like it’s an important comparison.

When I was twelve years old, I lost my mother to cancer. My father hasn’t dated since because he doesn’t want to and still feels love for my mother. Every year on the date of her death, he goes to where her ashes are in a tree, drinks a glass of champagne and tells her what she’s missed over that year.

It’s been ten years since her death.

Is he obsessed? No. Of course not, he loves her.

Now I know what you’re thinking, they were husband and wife, it was mutual. They both had romantic love for each other. However romantic love isn’t any better or stronger than platonic love.

There’s this attitude that if a man has unrequited romantic feelings for a woman then it’s immediately creepy, obsessive, dirty, perverse and wrong. This attitude is what dirties their whole relationship.

If you just limit Severus and Lily’s relationship to Severus having unrequited romantic love for her, then you get rid of the majority of it. After all, they were best friends. There was a deep, platonic love between the two of them. She was the only person who made him happy.

They say the best relationship is where your partner is also your best friend, and it is possible to have romantic and platonic love for someone at the same time. Lily was Severus’ only true friend, someone that brought him happiness. Of course it’s natural to still maintain feelings (romantic or platonic) for someone with whom you shared that deep a loving relationship (including friendship), there’s nothing to suggest it was unhealthy, or creepy, or lustful as people suggest.

This idea of an obsessed Severus is just another way to demonise him, and I think it can very damaging to views on the character and JK Rowling’s message of love, change and redemption.

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Fancinating animal. Looks like an odd compo of wolf and fox

The maned wolf, aka long legg

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Take care

Resurrecting my half-dead-not-really-alive-anyway blog to say just take care of yourslefs and loved ones xxx

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Vader shooting R2 in ANH is such a TOP TEN ANIME BETRAYLS mood 

;0

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Padme and fandom perception

I  have been reading a lot of meta about Padme lately and how she is received by fandom and how often she is shunned away as weak or stupid or a bad mother and I was thinking a lot about why that is. Padme is not the only character to make wrong decisions in the Saga nor is she the only female character  to do so. Leia lets her anger overtake her and encourages Chewie to strangle Lando in ESB and Rey keeps lying to herself about her parents for 19 years. Yet fandom seems to cheer on Leia about her so-called righteous anger and , well Rey is a different story because her parentage has been fanwanked to Mustafar and back and there are those who refuse the answer we were given in TLJ, but she is not getting as much flack as Padme either or if she does it is usually challenged by other parts of fandom.

With Padme that is not the case: people either bash her or headcanon her mistakes and weaknesses away, seemingly unable to reconcile the strong idealist with the woman who has her husband as her weakness. Part of it is how people except to see romance in fiction in today’s time. Around the time the PT was wrapping up, the Twilight series had become a pop culture phenomenon among teenage girls. I have never read the Twilight books or seen the movies and anything I know about the plot I learned it from media osmosis but I have an understanding that the level of critique it received for its main heroine’s obsession with the male lead was particularly vicious. People were going and on about how young girls will learn to romanticize abuse and end up in abusive relationships because of some silly books about vampires. As a result there was a lot of panic about whether a heroine who has romance as a central park of her story regains her agency when entering a relationship with a man (this is about hetero fictional romance, queer romance is approached differently by fandom though that’s another discussion). For example only one has to look with how many times the “Padme loved the Republic more than Anakin” line of thought has been stated through the internet. Because if a woman chooses a male partner then her personal agency is threatened and in a work of fiction, fandom can calm themselves over this perceived loss of agency by stating that the woman loves her career, her dog and her favourite TV show more than her partner. To do otherwise will strip her of her agency. 

Meanwhile male characters do not have the same burden so Anakin can kneel before Palpatine, beg him desperately to help him save her life and pledge himself to Sidious. That’s accepted and Anakin’s loss of his identity, agency and morality is not seen as something done because he is dependent on Padme. But when Padme confronts Anakin on Mustafar, her crying and pleading and emotional devastation, her wanting to help him and go away with him, her trying to salvage her family, make her an idiot and a spineless doormat. Apparently she should shot him while screaming “YOU PIG!!!” because any other reaction by a woman is weak.

Padme is also narratively “burdened” by her role as the mother of the OT heroes. She is held to an incredible high standard because as a mother she is not allowed to be flawed, make the wrong choice at the wrong time or show any suffering because of the emotional blows she receives. Instead she has to be the Saint Matron of Motherhood who never makes any mistakes and if not then she is a terrible mother that doesn’t care about her children and yes (!?!?) I have seen Padme been compared to mothers that throw their babies in the garbage or abusive mothers....Which is crazy, considering that when Padme hears about Anakin’s dream her first concern is the baby and when the twins are born she both manages to caress Luke’s cheek and even attempts to get a better look at Leia -who came second and therefore when Padme was closer to death-.

Last thing is a general confusion about how people proceed trauma. A person can face one bad experience and overcome and become devastated by another. A person can be strong in one way but weak in another. I have seen people headcanon that Anakin used a Jedi Mind Trick on Padme in AOTC because with the way she died, she surely must have been weak-minded. They ignore that just because someone gets emotionally shattered and can’t recover doesn’t mean that they are weak or lack conviction. If anything Padme refuses to compromise her morals in order to follow Anakin on the path he has chosen but also doesn’t lose her faith in him and the goodness that still resigns within him and in the end she is proven right. If that doesn’t show strength of character, I don’t know what does...

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All this ^^^ 

You wanna know why I think Padme is interpreted so differently by different people, or just completely ignored by most? I don’t think a lot of people want to reconcile with the fact that Padme is a smart, strong leader who can stay cool under pressure with the Padme that’s also so unapologetically romantic. They don’t want this to be the same person, because they just don’t think they go together. But Padme is. And a lot of women are. And you almost never see women be both in the media. They’re usually one or the other.

That’s why to some she’s the strong woman that George Lucas made completely out of character or she’s this weak, awful mother who didn’t stick around when her two children should have been able to rely on her, all because of a man. They don’t think that the 14-year-old girl who defeated the trade federation could also be the 27-year-old woman who had her heart completely and totally broken by her husband (though I don’t believe that was the only thing that broke her heart that day. The two things she had devoted her life to, The Republic and Anakin, had crashed and burned all in the same day, right in front of her eyes. That would take a toll on anybody.)

And, also, where did this concept of her making totally rational decisions all the time come about? She married a guy, like, 2 weeks after she saw him again for the first time in 10 years. Idk why people always take her actions in rots as out of character. She has a track record for not making totally smart decisions when it comes to Anakin.

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