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so many characters are only incidentally bisexual and could easily be interpreted as either gay or straight without much effect on their narrative or personality. not so with eleanor guthrie. despite her story not being About bisexuality she undeniably cannot be anything but. bisexuality leads that woman to places most people wouldn't go with a gun

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funny how in high school I didn’t have a massiveeee interest in Latin and now at an intermediate level of Spanish and Italian I can spend up hours and hours looking at the derivations and meanings and forms of declining every Latin word that comes up. It’s like seeing the little green codes in the matrix

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the best fanfic is the one the author had fun writing actually.

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There is no "after the revolution." No "ideal world." I don't care how much progress we make, we will always fail someone, hurt someone, and the best thing we can do is accept that, and keep striving to make it better as we go.

And don't get me wrong, I don't say this to discourage anyone from trying to make that ideal world. Quite the opposite.

I feel like it's very naive to continue to approach these big changes we want to make in the world as if there's an "after it's all over" when we don't have to worry about it anymore.

We should always be striving to make life better, even when life seems pretty damn good.

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vel/bix postwar theme song

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it’s crazy how every poem about dido is also about bix caleen (and also about bix and cassian there was some crazzyyyyyy material to work with regarding one of the most famous breakups in history)

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What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were. the silence of the girls - pat barker

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Adding straight to my Catalan!mozma & sarza conspiracies

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i have a vague highlight only loosely attached to reality Italian-renaissance-ish au for Andor but one of the really key things is Luthen being a priest and Kleya being his nun assistant and together they’ve resold 15 versions of the shroud of Turin. They’ve dug up a dozen peasant’s graves to be able to resell the Authentic Knucklebones of Sant’Antonio and in order to funnel cash into the restoration of the republic, local supposed-condottiero cassian andor has to keep buying them to hang up in his dining room

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what if. No Sequel Trilogy and instead. The Mortifying Ordeals of school sports day?

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This reinforced Rivers’s view that it was prolonged strain, immobility and helplessness that did the damage, and not the sudden shocks or bizarre horrors that the patients themselves were inclined to point to as the explanation for their condition. That would help to account for the greater prevalence of anxiety neuroses and hysterical disorders in women in peacetime, since their relatively more confined lives gave them fewer opportunities of reacting to stress in active and constructive ways. Any explanation of war neurosis must account for the fact that this apparently intensely masculine life of war and danger and hardship produced in men the same disorders that women suffered from in peace.

- Pat Barker, Regeneration

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What will they make of us, the people of those unimaginably distant times? One thing I do know: they won’t want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery. They won’t want to be told about the massacres of men and boys, the enslavement of women and girls. They won’t want to know we were living in a rape camp. No, they’ll go for something altogether softer. A love story, perhaps? I just hope they manage to work out who the lovers were. the silence of the girls - pat barker

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FOOD FOR THOUGHT

"Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do."

– Pat Barker

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turns out I was so wrong about how old Leida is lol she’s apparently 13 in andor season 1 and 14 at her wedding? Even more of a literal child. Showrunners what the fuck

There’s a lot that drives me fucking insane about this, starting from the fact it’s stupid and also continuing through the fact that it’s STUPID, but it also really highlights to me how out of touch season 2 seems to be with season 1 of its own show? Cause like we’ve already been here in the sense that Mon mothma clearly thought this was the case! She thought she’d have her special baby girl and then she’d be there happily ever after yaddah yaddah yaddah

and then like.

We had.

1.25 seasons proving how deeply this was Not the case. Even the first quarter of season 2 was about how this was Not The Case.

because leida mothma was one of the scariest parts of season 1. Leida mothma was a ticking time bomb. Leida mothma was a girl who grew up under the empire and took in its values - as many children would do, and not because they’re inherently evil or fascist but because they are Children- and who her mother could not save. Leida mothma is not the symbol of hope. She’s one of the worst and most hopeless moments this series could ever produce.

and I think there’s a deep fucking - and I will say fucking male gaze-y- view to this, that a cute little (nameless) baby Boy is the ultimate symbol of Hope, you see, but the girl who is already trapped in the narrative - who shouldn’t be infantilised as an infant but at 15/16 absolutely still IS a child - is like this sacrificable chess piece for the rebellion? Is this little teenage bitch who didn’t love her mother enough? Who knows. But Leida is a child, mark it down, and she’s a girl whose mother couldn’t save her from a fate that, following what actually comes from child marriages, almost certainly cannot save her from rape and pregnancy and loss of her bodily autonomy - and I think the andor writers kind of dissent want to acknowledge it because holy hell is that dark, Batman! But I also think they Knew, on some level, because they fucking named a teenage girl after a mythological woman who as raped by a god - the most powerful gps in the pantheon - and then forced to birth children themselves caught by war. I don’t want more shock value gender-based violence but I do want them to fucking acknowledge that if there’s a child marriage plot line that a massive part of why child marriage is such a crime against humanity is that it does often immediately entail rape and forced underage pregnancy like. It does. If they wanted a fucking baby plot line it should have been leida with a red headed toddler in a fancy nursery with the imperial emblem on the floor and Mon who can lead the rebel alliance but do nothing to save her own grandchild from the empire. It should have been leida ambiguously missing and a shot of that three year old right back at the start of the story where Dedra meero was, in an imperial kinder home.

so yeah I hate this plot line and I think it’s stupid and gilroy is stupid for it, and I fcukinf hate making bix whose already been tortured and sexually assaulted ALSO be the one to have a surprise wartime pregnancy and end up back on the hell farm planet she was assaulted on? - but I also hate it because it completely jarrs with season one and characters and themes already introduced into the narrative? Like they didn’t need to do a new baby plot line! Cassian already had a baby! Her name was Kerri, and given he was implicitly situationally forced to raise her from infant hood the loss of her was already this massive trauma in the shape of a missing child! And they didn’t need to do a plot line about how having a biological child is the ultimate sign of Hope that feels “legit” when they’ve spent 1.25 seasons showing this with Leida Mothma who is still a child!

and I fucking fucking hate the whole imposition of a nameless little boy over the two difficult, existing, breathing (well. Kerri maybe or may not) girls, ages 6 and 16, who might actually exist and might have names and might fucking Need something from the characters, might Need something from Cassian or Need Something from Mon mothma, and be proof of the fact that both are imperfect human beings !

Like the whole idea of the nameless perfect single-shot baby over the difficult living children is literally something so deeply wound into the actual fascist propaganda of family and childbearing and natalism that upholds these images to raise the number of people in the workforce while being incredibly violent towards actual living children especially girls that it makes me scream

Anyway.

no surprise hope babies we have no need of hope babies season 2 should have been cassian and mon’s parallel unshakeable grief and failure at their failure to save the girls who in different ways were their daughters and that they don’t ever talk about but who hang over the story like a cloud and a knife that should have been the fucking parenthood plot line

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I mean yeah despite the fact that Mon is trapped by Chandrilan marriage and Leida will be too they both consider that eel cocktail from their own home work “disgusting.” Or Leida does and then Mon says she’s lost the taste for it while she’s been away from Chandrilan. Which, of course, one doesn’t have to be a raging fan of alllll the food and customs of your culture, but taste is also a matter of perspective and it shows how Mon and Leida can in slightly different ways be estranged from the domestic practices and food of their own culture at the same time as they are trapped by that culture’s worst practices. Season 1 of this show really was that good!