#interesting-read

[inkskinned]

please i love you i'm begging you bring back suspension of disbelief bring back trusting the audience like. i cannot handle any more dialogue that sounds like a legal document. "hello, i am here to talk to you about the incident from a few minutes ago, because i feel you might be unwell, and i am invested in your personal wellbeing." "thank you, i am unwell because the incident was hurtful to me due to my childhood, which was bad." I CANT!!!!

do you know how many people are mad that authors use "growled" as a word for "said"? it's just poetics! they do not literally mean "growled," it's just a common replacement for "said with force but in a low tone." it's normal! do you hear me!! help me i love you please let me out of here!!!

[unsung-idiot]

don't show him modern technology; it won't end well

bonus under the cut:

[cardo-de-comer]

10/10 - "all is gone, none is won"

[meirimerens]

it is so funny to me how i started learning english on my own age 10 because the manga i was reading was turning so so so bad i went to fan content to cope with how shit it was. and 15 years later this pays off as my boss tells me i'm an essential asset in the team as the only fluent english-speaker.

[tide-locked]

i feel like people forget that sometimes characters in fic are written like that because it's a reflection of real life.

people have sex without setting boundaries. people have unprotected sex without talking about their sexual histories or producing recent sti tests. people play with kink without discussing it ahead of time or establishing a safeword. they have anal without 'enough' prep or lube—they may even prefer it like that.

and none of this is really a fantasy. it's all pretty normal. you can feel that it's inappropriately normalised, and you'd probably be right! but it is normalised: one study found that 58% of female undergraduate students on the campus studied had been choked during sex. 20% of those students said that they'd never been asked if it was ok; another 30% said they'd only sometimes been asked if they consented. fully half! (non-paywalled journal article on choking during sex here, including these numbers.) despite a rise in stis of all sorts, condom use is declining. (pdf link to the full text of this study about declining condom use in the us; aidsmap article about an australian study with similar results.)

even when people do talk about things—sex or anything else—they communicate imperfectly. 'yeah, but don't go too far' is consenting and setting a boundary, and also relying that the person you're talking to has the same metric for 'too far' that you do. for some people, 'the trash needs to go out' is a neutral, factual observation; for others, it's a request that the person they're speaking to take out the trash.

even when people understand each other perfectly, people react unpredictably to things sometimes! we behave irrationally! people laugh uncontrollably at funerals, or get angry at the straw that broke their back rather than the enormous load they were already carrying. they get scared and lash out at people trying to help them. when hurt, most people do not instinctively reach for therapy-approved grounding exercises and 'i feel' statements.

pretty much any bad choice that characters could conceivably make is a choice that people make in real life, on purpose, all the time. people do things that can have catastrophic, life-changing effects because it felt like a good idea at the time, or they're leaning into the vibe, or they just didn't think about it all that much, or an infinite number of other reasons.

fiction isn't intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible ways to live your life, and fanfic isn't any different. it's not a narrative flaw to let characters do things that are messy or harmful or downright stupid—it's a reflection of what people are actually like, and not something that authors should feel they have to apologise for.

[fifth-from-the-left]

Translation and Local ~Context~

[crustycrow]

HETEROSEXUAL CIS-PEOPLE LOOK HERE

Snaps my fingers at you as you scroll past this post

Look at me. Listen.

I'm not the best at serious posts, but that article up there reminded me of how important it is that people like you stand up for us. So hold on while I try to get this out of my mushy end-of-work-day brain.

We could fight this fight ourselves for decades trying to reach the equal laws, gender affirming trans healthcare that doesn't have a 2-5+ soul-eating years of waiting time, medical care with equal knowledge of lgbtqia+ bodies, and, what is often forgotten, inclusion in the little everyday areas of life like our way of speaking or things being set up or designed with the existence of queer people in mind.

But you joining in could get us there so much faster.

The power you have as a hetero cis person is that you set the standard for what is seen as the average way of treating us among other hetero cis people. You have been given the power of deciding what's "normal" and I'm begging you to use it.

Richard Green is a great example of to what extent your actions can help our situation, and smaller ways of support still add up to a great impact on society, and could make the days of the queer people you interact with.

Educate yourself before you speak up, but don't be silent.

[spirkbitch]

one more opinion about star trek fashion

it actually shouldn’t look like stuff you would wear (or at least a lot of it shouldn’t)

i’ve seen a lot of praise for modern trek fashion being better than classic trek because ‘people would actually wear that’

look at what people wore as everyday fashion 200-300 years ago, would you wear it? probably not, maybe for the novelty of it, but definitely not every day.

like, yeah this stuff looks crazy

it’s 300 years in the future. some of them are aliens, makes perfect sense to me that they would wear ridiculous extravagant clothes that look strange to my 21st century eye

similar to how if you showed modern fashion (especially alternative fashion/runway fashion) to someone dressed like this,

they would probably think we’re crazy.

yet for some reason modern trek wants us to believe that hundreds of years into the future people still just wear zip up hoodies?

(idk if the spock fit actually is a hoodie or not but come on man, the zipper? nothing more futuristic than a zipper?)

or this dress that looks like i could buy it in a 21st century target?

(not to hate on chapel, she’s just the only one i can find decent pictures of out of uniform)

also why is everything so grey now? when was it decided that people don’t wear colors in the future? i can not find out of uniform pictures where any of these people wear color, all black, white, grey, and maybe a bit of muted green.

tldr

clothing design in star trek should be just as important as clothing design in a period piece. i don’t think a screencap from any star trek should look like it could just as easily take place in the 21st century, i should see some crazy outfits. the clothes can do a lot of the heavy lifting to remind us that this is supposed to be far in the future.

[incognitopolls]

Vote based on the publication year of the physical copy that you own, not the book's first edition.

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[twofoursixohjuan]

please elaborate in tags :)

[keferon]

I was bored

[somewhereincairparavel]

"jason is a knockoff watered down percy" NO hear me out, jason actually parallels annabeth immensely, sharing SO many similarities with her personality, not percy, in this essay I will-

edit: my full analysis is out now! here

[mangozic]

archivist be upon ye

[fictionadventurer]

Fantasy is philosophy’s more gorgeously painted cousin. You can’t just tell a child a blunt fact about the human heart and expect them to believe you. That’s not how it works. You can’t scribble on a Post-it note for a 12-year-old: your strangeness is worth keeping, or your love will matter. You need to show it. And fantasy, with its limitless scope, gives us a way of offering longhand proof for otherwise inarticulable ideas: endurance and hatred and regret, and power and passion and death.

-Katherine Rundell, "Why children's books?"

[chirrups]

when in doubt, dog it out