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[bluedalahorse]

[bluedalahorse]

Do you think canon Sara and August will see each other again in the futur ?

Short answer: It’s not impossible! And it’s certainly great fanfic fodder.

Long answer: The question of “canon” Sara and August is what makes this question require a longer answer. The last we see of canon Sara and August is them broken up, and that’s the last we see of them as a pairing. At the same time, an important think about that scene is that Sara owns the part where she still has feelings. I don’t think that means Sara’s going to keep pining for decades, but I do think it means she’s not just girlbossing her way out of that relationship like she doesn’t care. She’s vulnerable and honest about the part of her that’s still in love. Her choosing her friends and Simon and herself has more meaning if she’s actually giving something up.

More importantly, though… I also don’t feel like I have to take all my orders from canon. And canon leaves these characters behind when they are young and their lives can still go any number of directions.

Now that canon is over, the characters belong to the fanfic writers. We are allowed to do what we want with them! Like, I saw some folks lamenting that Rosh/Stella didn’t become a real thing and Y’ALL IT STILL CAN. You can write a thing where Fredrika and Stella break up and adult journalist Stella is interviewing adult women’s national football team Rosh after they win the world cup, and Lisa will not smite you with a canon lightning bolt. She’ll probably kudo your fic with her secret AO3 account. WE ARE THE FANFIC WRITERS. NO GODS NO MASTERS.

Ahem.

A more interesting question for me is, what would need to happen next in Sara and August’s lives for them to one day have a Second Chance Romance? What are the fanfic ideas in my brain?

I don’t think they’re disappearing from one another’s lives entirely. Wille is still going to be interacting with his family members from time to time even if he isn’t Crown Prince, and that includes August. I myself read Wille and August’s reconciliation scene at the party as a new start for their relationship. Not one that forgets the past, but one that is able to move forward into the future. 

If Wille is going to keep interacting with family in some capacity or another, and Wille is going to stay with Simon and Simon is going to stay reconciled with his sister, then it is possible that Sara and August will occasionally still be crossing paths. Maybe not all the time, and maybe they work to keep their distance. Certainly they’ll date different people along the way and maybe they’ll be in situations where they end up meeting one another’s other partners at times. And they’ll both be growing up, you know? They’ll get to see sides of one another they don’t see as teenagers.

On August’s end, I do think if he wants to have any chance with Sara again, he has to make things right with Simon. But I think he’ll want to keep things right and continue to make them better with Wille (deep down what August really wants most is family, like more than he wants to be king, this is a hill I am prepared to die on) which would mean investing in trying to make things right with Simon. Not even for the sake of August’s relationship with Sara, but for the sake of August’s relationship with Wille. 

I know August wasn’t reconciling with Simon at the end of season 3, but I honestly think that a) making things right with Simon is going to take a lot of time, like years actually, and b) August had to start with Wilhelm and with their shared complicated grief over Erik, and that took a whole season. But believing in a universe where Simon and August can actually learn to get along with each other… idk. It’s kind of a cool idea. They have ambition and a sense of dedication in common, and it would be interesting to see them understand that. And I don’t think it’s completely implausible.

(In one of my imagined scenarios of August trying to be a better family member to Wille and Simon, Rosh’s wife—a wonderful OC character who I’ve named Agnes, who is a chill nerdy lady who owns a gaming store—arranges weekly DND campaigns for the three of them + maybe Ayub, and they all work through their stuff by leveling up their characters every week. Please believe in my DND universe with me, it’s incredible.)

Another thing I think would have to happen is August would have to leave the monarchy eventually. Which I think is totally possible too. I got another ask about that, so I’m going to save my thoughts for that post specifically.

Lastly, he needs stronger connections with other friends. Maybe that’s Nils and/or Vincent (both Nils and Vincent have interesting side plots in the future!fic I’m envisioning for August and Sara and the other mains) or maybe he makes brand new friendships he can lean on. That way Sara isn’t doing all the emotional labor ever for him.

On Sara’s list, I have less of a defined set of things I’d like to see, but I feel like growth and more life experience generally can’t hurt. I think it would be great if she’s dated some other people first, both casually and seriously so that she’s built up relationship experiences. And I think it would also help Sara to have some disabled/neurodivergent community, as that seems to be a thing she currently lacks in canon.

I think both of them need a significant amount of time apart (at least five years, but I’m thinking more like a decade) and also more therapy. All that said… neither Sara nor August need to be perfect for them to have a Get Back Together storyline. Otherwise there would be no story! They can be struggling with new grown up things.

Finally, I think it’s worth thinking about how much potential there is for both of them to change with time. When I think back on my teenage self 20 years ago… damn, teenage blue was selfish and sheltered and hadn’t done fuck all to confront her racial or socioeconomic privilege. She was taking out her internalized ableism on herself and other people all the time. It’s taken me a long time to grow up, and the path hasn’t always been linear.

The YR characters are so complex and dynamic that I think it does them a disservice to imagine futures where some of them are Only Ever Good and others of them are Only Ever Evil. I don’t think we have to envision a future where Sara and August get back together—like it’s not a mandate—but I don’t think there’s any mandate forcing us to imagine them apart forever, either.

And you know, after one has put in all that time on character growth… well. The reunion smut has the potential to be pretty hot. So there’s that, too.

[bluedalahorse]

Hiii <3 Which Tarot cards represent August‘s past, present and future the best in your opinion? 💕

OH HECK YES A QUESTION THAT’S RIGHT IN MY WHEELHOUSE. (I did once write a fan poem inspired by August and the Hanged Man that holds up for season three, I think. You may have been the person who requested it?) You might get more answer than you bargained for. I apologize in advance.

So my initial thought was just to jokingly respond to your question like this:

Because August’s life is like that sometimes. I say this with a deep and abiding affection for his messy character in its messy, messy arc.

(And I couldn’t post about this anyway, because the danger of shitposting about August as a genuine fan of his character arc, is that there are genuine haters out there who will take your post 100% seriously and use it as ammunition against him. Which is a shame because loving this character should be at least 60% making fun of him.)

I thought about it in more depth, and now I have a more extended answer. I’m not usually someone who pulls tarot cards with a particular “spread” with a set number of cards in mind. In a sequel post (was going to do it here but I have to get ready for work now) I might name some extra cards I could see coming up and being associated with different ideas. Especially since my Past-Present-Future cards are all Major Arcana, and I like to get some minors into a reading, when I can.

PAST - THE EMPEROR

August was born into old school power structures, and the emperor is all about, well, that. We can see that August clings to rules as things that help him to feel safe. I imagine August’s childhood was all about birthright and order—here’s what your future is going to look like, here’s all the things you are going to do and if you do them right/perfect, everything will be fine. Structure can be helpful up to a point (and August does have talents for organization and leadership that could be channeled in better directions, in different circumstances, won’t someone please write this boy into different circumstances) but at times the emperor can become authoritarian, and feed the illusion that one can escape misfortunes if they control every aspect of one’s life. The sooner August lets go of this illusion, the better.

PRESENT - THE TOWER

But not “Oops! All Towers.” I feel strongly that when we’re watching the three seasons of Young Royals, we’re meeting August in one of the big Tower Moments of his life. The Tower is absolute catastrophe. Its collapse is unavoidable because the problem is the design flaws in the Tower’s foundations. Tower energy is terrifying, but if you learn how to face it, you can climb out of the rubble and start anew.

I think August’s Tower energy is less about the external world and where he “ends up” or what happens to him, as it is about his internal world and his understanding of himself. The August we see at the beginning of the series seems to believe that if he moves fast enough and works hard enough, he can outrun his own grief and trauma. He cannot. They will catch up to him eventually. I think the Tower-rubble that August is standing in at the end of season three is sort of like… his old sense of self? He’s realizing what he thought he wants isn’t actually what he wanted, and he’s realizing that the things he did to feel “in control” never really made him in control. He’s realizing his grief for Erik and his father and for Hillerska is a lot more complicated than he thought, also, but it’s still grief and he still needs to feel it.

FUTURE - THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE

So I’m not really an August doomer. I don’t believe he’s stuck forever in his own harmful deeds and that he’ll never leave the Emperor space or Tower space. I get why it’s narratively comfortable for some fans to see him as unchanging or doomed forever, but I feel like he’s actually in a really uncomfortable and interesting in-between space between “horrendous demon-person caught forever in a hell of his own making” and “totally self-actualized woke bae who can take responsibility for all his actions and do all the right things.” He’s… in a messy place, but it’s a different messy place than he started the series in, and that’s dynamic. That’s fun! I love it! (Also, I already wrote Tragically Doomed Forever August in Heart and Homeland, so I’ve kind of already let myself explore that option for him, heh. Bring on the new life challenges.)

Right, were we talking about Tarot? The Wheel of Fortune reminds us that things are always on the move, and that they’re always changing. Life is not permanent. This doesn’t mean what came before doesn’t matter or didn’t play a role in shaping a person, but it does mean that things will change whether one wants them to or not. If you like how things are going in your life, they’ll suck eventually, and if they suck now, they won’t suck forever. I’m less interested in whether August falling into the heir role counts as “poetic justice” or not and more just interested in the way it means more seismic changes in his life. There’s story there! There’s potential! There’s more learning! LET’S MAKE A FANFIC ABOUT IT WHERE HE ENDS UP CRYING ON THE FLOOR OF THE WASHINGTON DC SWEDISH EMBASSY BATHROOM. (A one-shot I am working on right now, as it happens. Well, there’s more to it than that, but it’s not even 6 AM yet and I am feeling a little punchy.)

Kind of building on what I said in my Past and Present analyses… I think season 1 August assumed there was a predictable structure to life, and that you can count on certain things being fixed. And I think by season 3, he realizes that… that’s just not true. I don’t know if he likes that revelation, but he also recognizes it as truth whether he likes it or not. And that does feel like the beginning of a new era for him. The Wheel of Fortune doesn’t care what you think, it just rolls the changes in.

Anyway, what did a great philosopher once say?

Oh, that’s right.

It’ll pass.

And that’s the wheel in a nutshell.

[bluedalahorse]

The litany against getting Mad Online

[bluedalahorse]

Hello there! Could you share some post-s3 Sara & Felice friendship headcanons?

What a lovely ask! Glad to share some ideas that pop into my head:

Sara is the first person Felice comes out to as asexual. (Specifically gray ace.)

Whether Hillerska re-opens or not, Felice refuses to go back and ends up at a school in the city somewhere. She and Sara send one another post cards. Felice’s tend to be cutely decorated. Simon buys Sara fun pens she can use to write Felice, though she tends to write only in one color. She still doodles, though.

They’re actually pretty good at keeping up a distance friendship. At one point Sara’s working a job in either Malmö or Copenhagen, and she and Felice still stay in touch and have a weekly phone call time.

At the same time, once Sara moves back to Stockholm, she and Felice are… kind of living together for a time? This is based on a headcanon @heliza24 and I discussed together, but essentially, Felice’s parents have bought her a nice townhouse in Stockholm. Felice ends up sleeping at work a lot though because she’s so devoted to her restaurant. So she invites Sara to come live in her townhouse, because Sara needs a place to live, and Felice needs her townhouse to look lived in. They’re better at being roommates than they were at Hillerska.

Felice gives Sara advice for whatever her love life is doing for the moment based on her horoscope. The advice is inconsistent in how helpful it is, so it’s sort of a joke at this point.

Felice likes to drag Sara along on random road trips related to her cooking goals. Like she’ll hear that a particular farm has phenomenal rhubarb and she’ll convince Sara to drive her there. They have set playlists they’ll sing along the way.

Hope that’s a good start! What are some of your headcanons?

[bluedalahorse]

One thing that helps me calm down about intra-left-wing sniping and the reality that the big center-left coalition inevitably includes a lot of ridiculous nonsense, is to remember how ubiquitous seances were to progressive politics in the 19th century.  Like, e.g., Frederick Douglass had to go to so many seances. Many, many political strategy sessions around the country had to include feedback from the ghost of Moses who spoke to us via morse code.  

[bluedalahorse]

Here’s a random Young Royals ask:

What career do you think Sara will have in the future? Or what do you think her dream job would be?

I hope your day is lovely and amazing!!

Thank you! I hope your day is lovely and amazing too.

This is a great ask, and one where you might get more than you asked for. In part because I’ve thought about it a lot. I have not only a dream job in mind for Sara, but also some nightmare jobs as well. (Don’t worry, it’s all related to fanfic plots living in my head, and I promise they end in a good place.)

Is it okay if I start with Sara’s nightmare job? This one sort of popped into my head as I was envisioning what a Second Chance Romance could look like between Sara and August, maybe a decade after canon where August has done a lot of work and made various restitutions to Simon and gotten much more of his shit together.

As for that story… I thought it might be interesting, as far as like, what generates a plot and character arc, to put Sara at a job that’s taking advantage of her compassion and desire for justice. In my experience it’s pretty common for younger people to end up in situations like that in their first jobs, and I think it’d be interesting if Sara was in a place where she won’t deal with that in a romantic partner anymore, but she hasn’t learned to recognize it in a work situation yet. (This is pretty common in growing up—you tackle one issue in one part of one’s life and it sneakily migrates to another part.) So she’s working this nightmare job for an autism charity I’ve sneakily called PuzzleChildren (it’s a reference, shout if you get it!) which is trying to rehabilitate its image after news breaks that they haven’t really hired any actually autistic people. Sara’s hired by them, and they sound sincere at first so she’s trying her best to make things work with her coworkers and bosses, but over time she just kind of realizes that this place is shit and has no intention of changing. And then she moves into a line of work that’s much more fulfilling for her.

And what might that be? Well, I’m still deciding, but there’s a few career paths where I can see Sara being particularly happy:

Some sort of career in Environmental or Disability Justice. I’m not exactly sure why. It’s just vibes. I do think Sara is a person who cares deeply about people and causes, and both of those are areas where I can see her learning more at university and just finding a place that makes sense for her.

Helping people, especially other neurodivergent people, using some kind of animal therapy. Doesn’t have to be horses! Or maybe Sara will train service dogs or something. It’s possible Sara’s affinity for horses could translate over to other animals, and she could find a career path in that general direction.

Graphic novelist or picture book writer. We see Sara drawing in one scene in season 1, and for that reason, she’s always been someone who likes to draw in my head. We also know she’s a keen observer of human behavior and could have some interesting insights if she ever decided to write a story. I can see her doing memoir graphic novels with a similar tone to like, stuff by Marjane Satrapi or Maggie Thrash. Of course if the monarchy’s still around they might want to sue her for her honesty. But they shouldn’t.

What do you think? I can see lots of possibilities for Sara in the future!

[bluedalahorse]

I have to write a Statement about why I should be allowed to go abroad for my grad program, and then I’m going to work on that for a while before tackling a few lovely asks. (There’s still room for more, btw!)

[bluedalahorse]

“denied the catharsis of punishment” is an underappreciated but hugely effective narrative consequence imo 

[bluedalahorse]

Reblog if you want random YR-related asks in your inbox

[bluedalahorse]

@heliza24 wrote a meta and it’s great from start to finish!

Sara isn’t aromantic but she believes in their beliefs. 💚

Let’s talk about parallels between Wilhelm and Sara in Season 3 of Young Royals

Because there are so many! This is a continuation of sorts of this meta that I wrote about them being A and B plot protagonists in season 1 and 2. I don’t know that I would describe them exactly that way in season 3, but I do think their plots, character arcs, and themes are meant to mirror each other very closely this season.

One of my favorite things about the parallels between Wilhelm and Sara this season is that comparing them really makes you hold Sara’s friendship with Felice on the same level as Wilhelm’s romantic relationship with Simon (and Sara’s with August) which I think is so important. Both Wilhelm and Sara go through breakups over the course of the season (I think Felice’s reaction especially frames her friendship breakup with Sara similarly to a romantic breakup, which I love). And both of their arcs are about mending those relationships.

Sara and Wilhelm both need to experience the world outside of Hillerska before they can mend those relationships. Sara is able to glimpse some independence, even just through getting her license. The whole world is open to her now, as Felice says in ep 6. I don’t know that she would have been able to make her decision not to go back to August without experiencing that freedom. And Wilhelm also needs to experience the full force of what life in the monarchy would be like before he is able to decide to leave it. Because of this they also act as our window into the two different worlds outside of Hillerska, the palace and Bjarstad. They create the larger context in which we understand Hillerska this season.

I love that both of their journeys of personal growth are symbolized through cars. Wilhelm is always getting trapped with his mom or a member of the court in a fancy car; it’s where almost all of the monarchy’s most onerous instructions on how to live are delivered to him. So it’s huge when he leaves his parents in the chauffeured car at the end of episode 6 and goes to find Simon, Felice and Sara in Sara’s beat up used car. Meanwhile, Sara has traded in horses for the car. This is stated pretty explicitly when her dad asks her if she would like to work with horses and she declines, saying that she has come to realize that horses are simply traded by rich people as status symbols, and her dad suggests she get her drivers license since it will help with any job she wants. In seasons 1 and 2 Rousseau is pretty heavily associated with August, along with the pressures put on August and the other elite kids at Hillerska to conform to expectations (@bluedalahorse has written the Bible on that here), so the fact that Sara swaps out the horse for a car that can take her anywhere feels like a step away from both August and the prescriptive norms of Hillerska.

Sara and Wilhelm both reject what they saw as their destined future. This is obviously really clear for Wilhelm; he assumed he would be prince and then king after Erik died, and his greatest moment of character growth is when he decides he doesn’t have to fulfill that assigned role if it will keep him from being happy and living authentically. I love the scene where Sara talks with her dad about her fears that she will fail in the same ways that he did because she also has autism and adhd. This is a less clear-cut assigned destiny, but that fear of becoming a self fulfilling prophecy is equally overwhelming, especially because Sara has already let down someone she cares about in a way that’s not dissimilar to how her father breaks promises. The fact that she’s able to come to terms with her dad’s influence in her life, but realize she really is in charge of her own future, is really powerful. (I also think it’s such smart writing about the way disability and internalized ableism can really affect your self image).

In order to break free of those predetermined destinies, both Sara and Wilhelm need to see a father/mentor figure as more than black and white. Wilhelm needs to acknowledge that Erik wasn’t perfect, and did help contribute to some of the abusive traditions of Hillerska. Sara needs to recognize that even though her dad isn’t a perfect parent, she still loves him for the care he is able to show to her and wants to have him in her life. I love that both Wilhelm and Sara learn to hold multiple conflicting emotions about their loved ones. They can be disappointed by some of Micke and Erik’s actions, but they can still value their relationships with those family members and recognize them as complex, complete people.

They also both go on a similar journey with how they see August. Wilhelm comes to recognize that August is both a perpetrator and victim of the class system and Hillerska’s systemized abuse. Sara similarly realizes that August is an adult who needs to be responsible for his own emotions. She’s no longer interested in saving him from his complex feelings of guilt, and recognizes his potential to find self healing. Both of those new assessments of August grant him more maturity and complexity than earlier in the show. (They also reflect the way that August grows, in fits and starts, over the course of season 3. If there was a season 4 of the show, I think we would really see August respond to Sara and Wilhelm’s new attitudes towards him in a way that would fuel future character growth).

Viewing Erik, Micke, and August more complexly also allows Sara and Wilhelm to forgive themselves for the ways they are similar to those people. They are able to acknowledge the shame they feel around their actions, but also forgive themselves in the same way that they forgive others.

Both Sara and Wilhelm have specifically let down Simon in pretty big ways (Sara by secretly dating August, Wilhelm by perpetuating the royal family restrictions onto Simon). But they are able to recognize those mistakes and reconcile with Simon.

Wilhelm and Sara both leave the monarchy (Wilhelm literally, Sara by refusing a relationship with August), but they also leave a kind of prescriptive romance behind. Wilhelm says no to having to monitor Simon, to having to roll out his relationship in a certain way to please the court, and to having their future together mapped out and their decision around children made for them. Sara says no to a smaller set of requirements, but the traditional ways that August sees romance are so influenced by the monarchy (which is in turn so influenced patriarchy) that they are similar in some ways. Sara says no to having to do August’s emotional labor, to managing him so that he will fit the image of a good heir. She says no to waiting for him to visit on weekends while he does military service. She says no to this grand plan that he has. (This was @bluedalahorse’s point originally that she shared with me, and honestly I think it's so smart). Wilhelm chooses a romantic relationship that he and Simon are free to create together without rules; Sara chooses a friendship based on honesty and support. Both are valid options that give the characters a sense of peace and freedom. And they would not have been able to make those choices without all of the growth they went through over the course of the season.

I think Sara and Wilhelm's arcs compliment each other so well, and it was one of my favorite things about season 3. I loved watching both of them get to grow so much and end up in such a happy place.

[bluedalahorse]

Getting to know you tag game

Kiitos and tack to @sflow-er for tagging me! This was fun. Going to answer all my questions below. Maybe people will learn something new about me.

Do you make your bed?

No. It’s a loft bed so it’s sort of difficult to make, and no one sees it so there’s minimal incentive to do much with it. I mostly prefer to sleep in a nest of blankets.

What's your favourite number?

Nine. Odd numbers are fun and it’s three threes.

What is your job?

I don’t like to talk about it on tumblr, but it’s something in the education sector.

If you could go back to school, would you?

I am technically back at school at present, since I’m in a graduate program in writing part time. Honestly, I could just study forever and get paid to do so, without much extra strings attached, I would just go to university forever and major in a thousand different things while studying a thousand more.

Can you parallel park?

I cannot even drive, as it happens.

A job you had that would surprise people?

I used to work catering at my college, where I learned a lot about how to chop and prepare different vegetables and similar. The best thing about working catering was getting to take home leftovers. Also, chopping vegetables is a generally soothing thing for me to do when my anxiety is getting the better of me.

Do you think aliens are real?

Sure! Visiting earth seems unlikely (I mean why would you) but scientifically they have to be out there. I used to tell my mother I was an alien when I was a teenager.

Can you drive a manual car?

See above re: parallel parking. I think I’d be a lot more successful with a question about navigating city bus routes.

What's your guilty pleasure?

Hmm as I get older I am increasingly of the opinion that describing pleasures as “guilty” is something I’m too old and tired to do. Like, it would truly be not good for me to put food in this category. There’s also definitely favorite movies and books I have that I view with a cautious, critical eye (Lawrence of Arabia and Jane Eyre, for instance) but I don’t know if “critical consumption” and “indulging in guilty pleasures” are the same things. And I refuse to feel guilty for being an August and sargust enjoyer.

Like… I don’t know. Doll collecting? Is that a guilty pleasure? I currently wish my doll collection was making less a mess in my apartment.

Tattoos?

Not for me, but I’m glad for the people who like theirs.

Favourite colour?

Green, generally. For wearing, green again, as well as yellow and blue. (Or as I like to call them together, deconstructed green.)

Favourite type of music?

Gosh, hmm. I was going to say folk and progressive bluegrass, because a lot of stuff I like fits into that category already. (Nickel Creek, Punch Brothers, Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O’Donavan, I’m With Her, Rhiannon Giddens, Jake Blount, etc.) If the songs are murder ballads or songs about shipwrecks or whatever (shout out to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” on the Punch Brothers album Hell on Church Street) all the better. I also realize I like a lot of music with classical/orchestral influences, but not necessarily like… traditionally classical. Today I’ve been listening to Kishi Bashi’s Omoiyari album on repeat and thinking about how Marigolds would make a great song for an ensemble YR fanvid.

I think my favorites will always be the artists who are absolute nerds for music and who will play with genre about it.

Do you like puzzles?

I don’t think I like puzzles, like they’re not always something I seek out, but I promise you that if you put a jigsaw puzzle or a logic puzzle in front of me I will hyperfixate until I figure it out. So I guess I like them.

Any phobias?

Mice. They like to come into my apartment when it’s cold. I would prefer they don’t.

Favourite childhood sport?

Gym class was the bane of my existence, but I also come from a sporty family, so I could kind of tolerate basketball for my athletic mother’s sake.

Do you talk to yourself?

Absolutely. When I was getting my neuropsych evaluation, the evaluator noticed that I was always talking myself through tasks in order to get them done. This is apparently what you need to do when you score 99th percentile on verbal intelligence but 2nd percentile on things like task initiation and executive function.

What movies do you adore?

I tend to be more of a TV and documentaries person than a movies person right now. That said, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and the 2005 Pride and Prejudice are good comfort watches, as is Pixar’s Luca. I really like the Georgian movie And Then We Danced.

Coffee or tea?

Tea. Specifically, green tea. Coffee is yummy (I like bitter things sometimes) but doesn’t play well with my health.

What was the first thing you wanted to be growing up?

I wanted to be a writer pretty early. That said, the earliest written record I have of “what do you want to be when you grow up” was a first grade assignment where we had to answer that question. The two jobs I named were teacher and artist, specifically an artist who paints murals. (I misspelled the word “mural” because in the Baltimore accent I grew up with, mural is essentially one slurred syllable. Make me say Aaron earned an iron urn, I dare you.)

No pressure tags to: whoever wants them! I have not been on tumblr much lately so I don’t know who’s done this already.

[bluedalahorse]

i can never write a soulmates au cause i very quickly stop thinking about romance and start thinking about the sociological implications of a world where soulmates are a confirmed verifiable thing

[bluedalahorse]

a love letter of sorts

I have such a soft squishy place in my heart for the secondary Hillerska students. It can feel tempting (and even safe) to believe that each of them will never change, that they will become their parents, that they will send their own kids to Hillerska where those kids will repeat the same mistakes. But we are told in season 2 that the enrollment numbers are dropping. At the end of season 3, the school may fight to keep its doors open and it may or may not succeed. And our characters will keep growing up and encountering the world. I choose to believe that everyone we’ve gotten to know has had some kind of seed planted, that there is at least one future where they break with the patterns of their youth, and the values they were raised with.

Let me read the story about Vincent learning to spot and overcome his internalized ableism and understand that a school that graduated him without meeting his individual learning needs wasn’t actually supporting him. Tell me about how Nils comes out to his family and it goes surprisingly okay, but things get tricky when he decides he wants to run a different sort of company, with different sorts of business practices, than his father does. Show me Stella and Fredrika’s blissful summer of first love, followed by a devastating breakup, followed by the slow and silly and scary rebuild of their friendship, until they’re those amicable lesbian exes, you know the ones, we all know the ones. Or what about when Maddie starts to recognize (and then has to question) the more performative and culturally appropriative aspects of her witchcraft, and tries to do things better? What would it look like for her to move from radical slogans and aesthetic toward true liberation work?

I say this not out of naive optimism but out of the love I feel for these fictional characters I spent time with over the past few years, and out of my love for a good story. I don’t see why I should have to shut the door on these Hillerska kids and forget about them and divest from their progress. I love a good character arc. I love an imperfect, not always linear journey that begins from a deeply flawed starting place and ends up somewhere wholly different.

Each of these characters is the beginning of a story, and therefore a gift.

[bluedalahorse]

Other fandoms: celebrate their characters' birthdays

Les Mis fandom: celebrate their characters' massacre

[bluedalahorse]

they diagnosed me with i love you and it’s incurable

[bluedalahorse]

A question for the expert dash curators out there:

I have blocked some tags recently and doing so has made it easier for me to log on to my dash and browse it and enjoy it. However, there is one thing I can’t seem to curate for. Which is: does anyone have any advice for blocking the kind of post that’s like “character x is a piece of shit human who has never changed and will never change” off their dashboard?

It’s not so much that I politely disagree (although I do, politely, disagree with certain points in this genre of post, even when I agree with other points in this genre of post.) It’s more that here I am, settling down to write fanfic about character x, trying to take them on a more positive trajectory based on what I saw in the canon, figuring a whole fictional playground is wide open to me. And post like this one just sort of knock the wind out of my sails and make me wonder what the point of even writing is.

I figure that’s the sort of thing I should block/curate for, right?

So far the only thing that has worked is logging out of tumblr for days at a time. Maybe that should be the game plan for Monday.