#rereading it though... i do hate it

[waitineedaname]

finished rereading volume 3 last night and it's so wild to me that there are people who come out of this series hating Luo Binghe. he's expressing his deepest insecurities about being abandoned and unloved and useless and having the worst BPD episode of his life, and people somehow read that and think he's some horrible person?? get behind me Binghe, they don't deserve you

[bayetea]

there's a line during the big medea fight in tlh (I love this fight) where jason and leo are being mind controlled into fighting each other and piper says "you can't fight! you're best friends!" and saying this is what finally breaks the spell after several failed attempts. on one hand we can just read this as piper's desperation and not much else but it really just reminds me of how roughly jason and leo's friendship is written. they have such a glaring show vs tell problem going on. this moment occurs only as far as the middle of the book, so jason and leo are definitely not best friends (not yet anyway - and leo has actually known piper for 4 months and they get along well enough, so why wouldn't she categorically be his "best" friend?). leo has spent no time at that point unpacking his false memories of jason - their being best friends is equally as false as piper being jason's girlfriend. I feel that this line is the start of an ongoing problem in the jason&leo dynamic throughout hoo where you're told repeatedly that they're besties but like. are they.....? are we shown that they enjoy each other's company THAT much or are we told? because by the end of hoo it seems like their best dynamics are with other characters and not each other

[nestastits]

A part in acosf that will always make me upset is when amren straight up embeds it into Rhys’s mind to use the Archeron sisters as weapons so he can become high king with Nesta’s sword.

[deimosatellite]

the part when ivan was talking to alyosha and was like "russian boys are all the same. there is one russian boy i like though his name is alyosha :)" SCREAMING CRYING THFOWING UP WHAT IF I PASSED OUT HUH

[choco-dawn]

heyyy its been awhileeee, here's a bunch more shepherds stuff that i wanted to finish waaaayyy sooner and draw more of, but i think theres enough to post now!!! alot of it is very stupid and or random </3

(the chase and red comic is based of this!) and finally, really dumb thing, idk i don't want to make its own post but it still makes me laugh

okay thats all ily bye see you in a few months <3

[every-sanji]

[clanborn]

my worst wc opinion is that i actually like rootspring you are welcome to make fun of me for this

[quatregats]

Thinking a lot of thoughts about Hornblower's relationships with Barbara and Maria as a metaphor for his larger relationship to social mobility and ambition, and I think there's actually a lot there - not sure if it was intentional, but I do think that whether intentionally or inadvertently, Forester did an interesting job with the parallels.

Quick note beforehand that some of this is based on my constant brief paging through C. Northcote Parkinson's Hornblower "biography", which, while I absolutely abhor his interpretation of Hornblower, gives even more food for thought on this point. I'm also leaning more into his interpretation of Hornblower's background and childhood, as opposed to the TV show's, so it might not work if you're coming from the TV show's perspective.

Parkinson takes Forester's comment that Hornblower was a "doctor's son" to mean that he was the son of an apothecary, rather than a physician like in the show. I'm not a historian of the period, so I would be hard-pressed to actually try to fit Hornblower's father within the 18th-century framework of medical practice, but either way, given his awkwardness around upper-class life and that he seems to have grown up in rural Kent, I think that Parkinson's claim that he was the son of an apothecary, rather than a physician, does have some reasonable foundation, or is at least equally plausible (to me) as the show's.

Hornblower struggles with poverty through most of the series, especially the first half, but even when he is barely scraping by, such as at the start of Lieutenant, this does not seem to be an abnormal state; and when he finally arrives at wealth and success, he constantly wishes to go back to the days when he was a penniless lieutenant, so from this we might also surmise that he did not come from wealth. (I'm also comparing especially to Jack Aubrey, who, while he admittedly makes a hash of coming into large amounts of money, and who also lives perfectly happily on very little, is clearly quite comfortable being the "lord of the manor" by comparison.)

One of the biggest changes in the second half of the series (from The Happy Return/Beat to Quarters onward) is that Hornblower's career comes into fruition; he becomes a decorated Captain, a member of the landed gentry, a Knight of Bath, a Peer, and finally an admiral, and marries into an enormously influential family. He's constantly in conflict about this, until he isn't: he wants to become someone powerful and important, except that he doesn't like the role once he gets it, and constantly wishes about the old days, then feels guilty for wishing for them. Most importantly, he seems to become less and less himself, his mental narrative getting more and more distorted as he tries to mold himself into the person he thinks he wants to be.

I don't think this is a particular novel interpretation, but I think that in light of this, the contrast between his marriage to Maria and his marriage to Barbara is very interesting. If he was an apothecary's son, his and Maria's marriage would make a decent amount of sense - they'd be from similar social backgrounds, and probably a reasonable match, if Hornblower's career had continued as expected. Hornblower feels comfortable around Maria at the start of their friendship and the very beginning of their marriage in a way that mirrors his comfort with the life he's living at that point - which is to say that he clearly knows and understands what's expected of him and how to interact, in clear contrast with later books. But on the other hand, for all that he originally does love Maria, Hornblower comes to find her to be coarse, unrefined, and boring, and feel that she is not good enough for the person he wants to become. It's at the point when he starts to feel that he's moved passed Maria that he begins to take on his new, ambitious, performative persona.

On the other hand, Hornblower feels stiff and uncomfortable around Barbara from the beginning of their relationship, notably for reasons of class, and even in later books, consistently sounds intimidated by her poise and upper-class untouchability. With Maria he doesn't feel enough for her; with Barbara he feels too much, an almost uncouth sentimentality. He craves Barbara's status like a man drowning, but can't hold up under the weight of what it would mean. They have very strong intellectual chemistry, but socially they are a disaster of a couple, and yet nonetheless, Hornblower continues with the marriage because it feels to him like the thing he ought to do, just as he ought to become squire of Smallbridge. He's so viscerally uncomfortable with his position in the later books in a way he wasn't even at the height of his earlier miseries, but he refuses to let himself admit that his ambitions might have led him astray.

I think it's also interesting that the relationship which Hornblower arguably finds the most fulfilling (or rather, it was written very poorly if Forester wanted to make it feel fulfilling for the reader, but nonetheless it was clearly meant to be the most fulfilling for Hornblower) is his relationship with Marie, who sits at a similar odd juncture to him. In the text, Forester says outright that Marie fulfills Hornblower's interest in upper-class women (ambition) while not intimidating him, yet still being a satisfying intellectual partner. Nonetheless, just as Marie and Hornblower can never actually end up together, Hornblower can never actually be comfortable with his position, and no matter how many times he tries to find solace in her, he is eventually forced to continue down the path that he began, making up with Barbara and fully taking up the mantle of Admiral and Peer of the Realm.

In short, I think that watching the way in which Hornblower's relationship with Maria evolves over the course of the early books and the way in which his relationship with Barbara takes up after that ends up being a very neat parallel to his own ambitions and class identity. With Maria he is at home, but bored and restless; with Barbara he gets everything that he wants, but feels like a fish out of water. I think that particular parallel is part of the particular tragedy of Hornblower - he can't ever be satisfied with the person he was, or the person he's become. But I think that adding in aspects of extreme class difference - even more class difference than the general trends of social mobility during this period - also helps to elucidate the fundamental tension which drives Hornblower forward as a character. The world he came from was too small for him; the world in which he moves now is far too big; but there's no in-between option. He has to choose what he wants to be, and sacrifice some part of himself in order to do that, and in light of this reading of him, I think that there's a lot of interesting dilemmas to be raised.

[buttercupshands]

wait a minute

stop.

stop it.

[a-high-femme]

getting simultaneous texts from my dad and my high school best friend about David Lynch’s death was a fucking throat punch oh my god

[rexcaliburechoes]

does anyone else find it fucked up that moon's friends protect themselves from her with the skyfire at the end of moon rising?

[kicksnscribs]

fucking hate when a new FNAF game drops bc im am no where near interested in participating in the fandom and yet i am always reminded that I am willing to seek out and consume any and everything that involves one specific character for hours the second that i see any hint of them on the screen...

[5dtetris-revisited]

ohmyGodwait i didn't see frankenstein or trainspotting when i was on my wild goose book search. the four books i have historically gone nuts about are missing.

[tripably]

please say the fic you're writing is koskela/hietanen 🥺 I ship it so hard but there are so few fics for it

(I will also be excited about any other pairing if the answer is no lmao)

I'm literally choking up to have received this ask THANK YOU FOR ASKING YES !! YES !! YES !! It's a little Koskela/Hietanen fix-it sort of thing, maybe 5k or so when finished, which I'm writing to mend my broken heart 🥹 it is proving a bit of a task though because half the time I think about either of these two I start crying HAHHAHAH I LOVE THEM SO MUCH 😭😭😭

[chiisana-lion]

theyre like some kind of muppet

[lordsardine]

.