#(as like. implicit tags)

[saturnniidae]

I love Mel and I'm glad so many people agree on her beauty, she is a gorgeous, breathtakingly majestic black woman and I'm glad she's appreciated but istg mfs only ever talking about how attractive she is rather than her intelligence and complex morality.

Everyone wants a morally grey woman character until she's black suddenly it's crickets in the crowd. Ik it's not usually intentional but (typically white) people have such an inate unwillingness to discuss poc (Especially woc) characters beyond surface level and it's annoying asf

[whamss]

Hrm you know I sort of think that people kind of miss out on the beauty of Kanaya having a "type" for "dangerous women" when they fail to account for the fact that Kanaya too is a dangerous woman. Like don't get me wrong, it's a very different type of dangerous. Kanaya is attracted to women with an impulsive, self-destructive kind of danger. Women who throw themselves into situations headfirst and a lot of the time will stumble out on the other side a little worse for wear (but they're effective, still, and that makes it thrilling). But like Kanaya has such a deliberate and relentless violence to her, a dangerous woman who keeps herself dormant until the time is right, but when she lets herself out she hits hard and fast (and she's also very effective, this is also quite thrilling). Things I've been rotating a lot, I think it's fun to view Kanaya's love for dangerous women less like she's a passive woman admiring and taking care of women she cannot control, and more like her enjoying the company of forces just as threatening and dangerous as she is, but a touch more chaotic in their methods

[beebfreeb]

do you have any docs about the conlang and/or conscript? i just found your art and that immediately stood out as incredibly cool. i wanna write some funny stuff

The majority of my conlang stuff is written on graph paper held together with a paperclip or a spreadsheet file on my computer, so I do not have much easily accessible to share. Hm...

The vocabulary is currently... quite measly ever since I bulldozed everything and killed it all dead. So fleshing out vocabulary and whatnot is what I have to work on next. Grammar is similarly rudimentary but it was never intended to be very complex. A lot of information wouldn't be encoded verbally, only through pheromones and body language.

[bluedalahorse]

boarding schools (and Hillerska specifically) in fact and fiction

The results of this poll about whether or not you’d want to attend Hillerska have been revolving around in my head over the past few days. I flippantly voted yes (spoiled Swedish teens feel like a piece of cake compared to reality at the moment) but in practice generally agree with many of the reasons stated in the no column. So, if you did vote no and say why, know that I agree with you. This isn’t a post to argue against you or anything, this is just an extended wondering about something else.

At the same time, I noticed that we heard a lot from the nos and not as much from the yeses in response to this poll. In complete earnest, I wish we could have heard more from the yeses. (If you did vote yes and want to message me about your ideas one on one, I’d love to hear from you and I promise I don’t bite.) I’m curious to know if some of the same things about Hillerska-as-a-setting appealed to you as did me when I first started watching the show. Because it’s an engaging enough setting that I, you know, do own the Hillerska hoodie and all.

On one hand:

I do want to acknowledge how, in creating Hillerska, the writers drew on harrowing stories of real boarding schools—class hierarchy, insular social mores, outdated traditions, secrets, horrific acts of hazing. The writers researched all of this, interviewing former students, and incorporated that into Young Royals to increase the sense of realism and play to the show’s class commentary.

On the other hand:

I also started thinking about how the show leans into boarding schools as a literary device. In youth-centered fiction, boarding schools are a kind of liminal setting that facilitates independence from adults and a higher level of agency for teenage protagonists. These teens are called to make decisions and sort out conflicts amongst themselves. There’s this idea of, who can you become without your family looking over your shoulder? In what ways do you feel pressured to be like them, or to break away from them? And all the gothic architecture and uniforms and secrets and traditions are easy for writers to convey through a lens of romanticism.

And… Young Royals does not fully reject that romanticism. Indeed, it embraces it often. It uses the romantic boarding school angle to market the show and grab our attention—for example, see all the promo material where the characters are in their uniforms getting photographed for student picture day and such. The creative team offers us the romanticism of boarding school the same way they offer us the romanticism of intense first loves between princes and commoners.

I actually think Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship and Hillerska-the-liminal-space as a setting are very much intertwined. Hillerska is a catalyst for Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship; if Wilhelm fell in love with Simon in a club or on a train, and not in the school chapel where Simon is singing a solo in defiance of posh students who heckle him, their story would be completely different. I can’t (personally) imagine Wilhelm and Simon’s story without the beats of school parties in the Palace, or their hugs-in-white-nightgowns on Lucia night, or their stupid grins at one another during rowing practices, or their stolen kiss at the Valentine’s ball. The school provides a lot of obstacles to their relationship but it also facilitates these iconic moments of connection between the two of them, and I feel like in the first two seasons at least that’s supposed to matter.

And maybe, stick with me here, but I don’t… think it’s like, wrong, or hypocritical or whatever, that YR leans into romanticism and realism re: Hillerska at the same time? I actually think it’s pretty common in school-focused stories to put these two modes of storytelling in dialogue with one another? The romantic (in the literary sense, not the conventional) elements of a boarding school story are there to honor the tempestuous emotions of the teenage characters in their coming of age, as they bump up against adult pressures and the first hints of the “realistic” adult world. (I’m thinking about like, Dead Poet’s Society, and A Separate Peace, and A Great and Terrible Beauty as other examples of this. They all make social commentary through their setting but they also immerse you in it and sweep you up into it.)

I know Hillerska doesn’t survive the series and Wilhelm and Simon’s relationship does, and I’ve heard that after season 3 there were some things said in interviews and some extremely mixed messages about the setting at times. But also like… look. For all the later stumbles with the writing, I’m a slut for setting and a slut for setting as a way to reveal character arcs and facilitate relationships and Hillerska is a setting that captivated me from the beginning and it’s a lot of what made Young Royals what it was.

No I would not want to attend the school in real life as a real life human. Yes I would love to spend more time there in fiction because that is how fiction works, you get to explore settings you wouldn’t want to explore in real life. Go ahead and accuse me of being at the devil’s sacrament because didn’t we all meet at the devil’s sacrament?

Credit goes to @heliza24 for the devil’s sacrament joke because she’s smarter and funnier than me.

[thunderboltfire]

Oho, it's Assigned a (possibly) NSFW rating on Tumblr.com time!

I find it sort-of hilarious, but speaking more seriously I have no idea how the adult content labels operate right now. (was it marked by a bot because it's beige? did someone ask to mark it?)

[5mcsinatrenchcoat]

Baldur's Gate is not a small city, and there's never a shortage of kids running on its streets. Fighting, stealing, making a name for themselves. Creating their own crews and sticking to them, mostly. That being said, if you grew up on the same streets, you probably crossed paths at least once. Even if you're unlikely to remember it...

When Karlach was talking about her childhood, I couldn't help but think: what are the chances that Vice, a street urchin from the same city and of approximately similar age, ever met her?

Wouldn't that be cute.

[tagidearte]

There's something special about Moon being the only side of the DCA who has canonically (gameverse) voiced his counterpart's name ("No more Sun", which yes it's not him directly saying Sun's name since it's a figure of speech, but still) whereas Sun - the chatterbox - only refers to Moon via "he" or "other me". Moon, the quiet one who mostly laughs vs Sun who mostly uses words. Sun, who is scared of Moon, never utters his name whereas Moon clearly has no problem with it. Both of them using "we☀️/us🌙" prior to Eclipse. Moon, whose only opinion of Sun we can infer is "the other me trapped me in light so now I trap him in shadow", vs Sun's whole thing which is profoundly more fleshed out.

I don't know man, the "no more Sun" line always did things to me. I remember playing Ruin for the first time and getting this... jarring emotion when I heard Moon saying that. It's such a small line but good god did I latch onto it.

[summergoodwife]

Gonna say it again, "Just stop consuming the genre" is THE WORST POSSIBLE RESPONSE to someone complaining about the lack of representation in their preferred genre!! And "Consume other stuff too" is not much better!!! I don't care how much you think varying media consumption is a Good and Holy lifestyle, not everyone wants to do that! There is no obligation to do that and there should not be! Because it's fucking entertainment. It's not a college major.

And! And and and. I would be remiss to not point out that when you tell someone, "If you want well written (minority) just get out of (genre fandom)" you are, regardless of your motivations, rhetorically aligning yourself with the exact same bigots who just want the pro-representation crowd to shut up and go away.

[macbcth]

just turned in bnha fanfic with changed names for my creative writing final. i am only a little ashamed

[aylasnothereatm]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/63774127/chapters/164615395

K-LB my beloved

[thewingedwolf]

“don’t talk about fic you don’t like” “well you consented to reading the moment you clicked the link” “we’re doing this for free you know” at some point you guys will learn that fanfiction is part of fandom the same as everything else and this will be critiqued like everything else and you are not in fact paragons of goodness and virtue that are beyond the same reproach everyone in fandom gets

[unnonexistence]

ok i hate those ambiguous math notation ragebait posts so so much. however. it's worse when the notation is not ambiguous and someone is insisting that it is

[hauntingblue]

Why are dio and pucci chilling in a bed like they are in a sleepover.... nvm

[saturnniidae]

I feel like some people need to seriously remember that their whiteness comes before any other kind of marginalized identity and thats not erasure or anything that's literally just the truth

[therevengeoffrankenstein]

hey i would prefer if those under 18 didn’t interact with my nsfw posts. it’s for your safety and my comfort. i don’t care if it’s like shitposts but otherwise i may start blocking some minors following me.