capacity-for-wonder - Tumblr blog

[capacity-for-wonder]

hey john darnielle what the fuck

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i feel totally normal about this and the scope of my desire is completely average

[capacity-for-wonder]

“What kind of person was Lancelot? I know about half the kind of person he was, because Malory contented himself with sharing the obvious half. He was more interested in the plot than the characters, and, as soon as he had laid down the broad lines of the latter, he left it at that. Malory’s Lancelot is: 1. Intensely sensitive to moral issues. 2. Ambitious of true - not current - distinction. 3. Probably sadistic or he would not have taken such frightful care to be gentle. 4. Superstitious or totemistic or whatever the word is. He connects his martial luck with virginity, like the schoolboy who thinks he will only bowl well in the march tomorrow if he does not abuse himself today. 5. Fastidious, monogamous, serious. 6. Ferociously punitive to his own body. He denies it and slave-drives it. 7. Devoted to ‘honour,’ which he regards as keeping promises and ‘having a Word.’ He tries to be consistent. 8. Curiously tolerant of other people who do not follow his own standards. He was nor shocked by the lady who was naked as a needle. 9. Not without a sense of humour. It was a good joke dressing up as Kay. And he often says amusing things. 10. Fond of being alone. 11. Humble about his athleticism: not false modesty. 12. Self-critical. Aware of some big lack in himself. What was it? 13. Subject to pity, cf. no. 3. 14. Emotional. He is the only person Mallory mentions as crying from relief. 15. Highly strung: subject to nervous breakdowns. 16. Yet practical. He ends by dealing with the Guenever situation pretty well. He is a good man to have with you in a tight corner. 17. Homosexual? Can a person be ambi-sexual - bisexual or whatever? His treatment of young boys like Gareth and Cote Male Tale is very tender and his feeling for Arthur profound. Yet I do so want not to have to write a ‘modern’ novel about him. I could only bring myself to mention this trait, if it is a trait, in the most oblique way. 18. Human. He firmly believes that for him it is a choice between God and Guenever, and he takes Guenever. He says: This is wrong and against my will, but I can’t help it. It seems to me that no 17 is the operative number in this list. What was the lack? On first inspection one would be inclined to link it up with no 17, but I don’t understand about bisexuality, so can’t write about it. There was definitely something ‘wrong’ with Lancelot, in the common sense, and this was what turned him into a genius. It is very troublesome. People he was like: 1. Lawrence of Arabia, 2. A nice captain of the cricket, 3. Parnell, 4. Sir W Raleigh, 5. Hamlet, 6. me, 7. Prince Rufant, 8. Montros, 9. Tony Ireland or Von Simm […] or whatever, 10. Any mad man, 11. Adam.”

— T.H. White’s notes on the character of Lancelot.

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“In the secret parts of his peculiar brain, those unhappy and inextricable tangles which he felt at the roots, the boy was disabled by something which we cannot explain. He could not have explained either, and for us it is all too long ago. He loved Arthur and he loved Guenever and he hated himself. The best knight of the world: everybody envied the self-esteem which must surely be his. But Lancelot never believed he was good or nice. Under the grotesque, magnificent shell with a face like Quasimodo’s, there was shame and self-loathing which had been planted there when he was tiny, by something which it is now too late to trace. It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible.”

— T.H. White, The Ill-Made Knight

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Sleep deprived in the airport so I’m gonna be Richard Siken posting. So this quote from one of his interviews (that he referenced in his tweets) is interesting to me because it begs the question- if we move something to the erotic to then pull back in order to find tenderness, how then do we apply this to sapphic relationships? Erotic relationships between women are fetishized by cisheteropatriarchy. So how then do we push forward in order to pull back? If we push into an erotic that is already co-opted and fetishized by patriarchy, how do we push further?

Perhaps this explains the prevalence of sapphic horror. The worst thing sapphic women can be in the eyes of cisheteropatriarchy is not erotic, but horrific. Taking something fetishizable and make it gross. And only then, now that we have pushed past what is desirable to cisheteropatriarchy, can we pull back and find tenderness free from the partrarchichal gaze.

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hi. go buy esims for gaza. go preorder a kufiya from hirbawi. buy insulin for palestinian diabetics who need that help. if you live in the states use this to email your reps (this takes maybe 5 seconds to do). check out this massive list of resources where you can educate yourself in a meaningful and actionable way even if you don't have the financial means right now. from the river to the sea palestine will be free. 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

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Love this so much and Blue’s thoughts here remind me of this bit from a Patricia Lockwood essay that I read weeks ago and haven’t been able to get out of my head: “People did not die for me, not till lately, they just went out of town.”

Some Things Fall Away - Alice By Heart, Steven Sater & Duncan Sheik Blue Lily, Lily Blue/ The Raven King/ Opal

there's something so incredibly haunting about the multitude of ways maggie stiefvater articulates grief throughout trc...opal's distress and childish anger at the unfairness of this world for taking the cloud lady away. blue's simple understanding that she will now be forever changed by the loss of persephone. ronan's stoic control in the aftermath of his mother's gruesome unmaking, his need to push into something beyond sadness because if he allows himself to think or feel this for even just a moment he'll break. not to mention the sheer fact that he's already been mourning his parents for months upon months before losing his mother again.... idk. so much of this series is propelled by death and loss and grief and yet the tone overall remains one of wonder, and yes that has to do with the magic and adventure and teenage silliness obviously but truly what's at the heart of it all is the boundless love that exists inherently within grief

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fast car by tracy chapman isnt even a song thats God

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The thing about Fast Car is that it is a love song but it’s a love song about how sometimes the love is real enough to get you out but not real enough to last.

Like sometimes even after you get out of the bad place you started in, the person you love never learns how to stop leaving, but that’s okay, it’s okay because the love already did what it had to do. It gave you what you needed to get out. And maybe that was a fast car, or the assurance that you wouldn’t be alone, or the feeling that you could be someone. It didn’t last, but you got out. You became someone. That person you loved left you, but they also got you to a place where you could be someone.

That’s why the song feels tragic and hopeful at the same time. The love was real. It was real enough to get you out, just not real enough to last.

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Audience vs Community

So last night we watched Marcel the Shell with Shoes On because my fiancé was like “this will help you process the recent death of your grandmother” (thoughtful, but wrong) and there’s this one part where Marcel (the shell) is reading through the comments on a viral YouTube video of him asking for help trying to find his shell family (I was weeping profusely at this point) and no one is responding to his call to action they are just like “what a cute shell ily” and Marcel very sadly says:

“It’s an audience, but it’s not a community.”

And I’ve been thinking all day about how this distinction between audience and community is really at the crux of a lot of recent tension in fan spaces. Like you have a lot of younger folks excitedly sharing their favorite fics on a platform like tik tok. And they are thinking- “this is great! Now more people can find this thing I love.” But what they are doing is building an audience for that thing/creator (something apps like tik tok are really good at) but they are not, with any intentionality, building a community around that thing (something that a platform like AO3 is actually organically really good at imo). Which I think is why we see authors of very popular fics deleting said works, or the generally different responses to public criticism/ critique of fan works. Anyway, I think a lot of folks, especially some youngins who grew up immersed in a social media landscape that is always prioritizing audience (and in many ways, incentivizing engagement, which is easiest to get through conflict, and therefore very specifically discouraging community building) misread what the intention is behind fan works for most authors. They assume there is a desire for an audience (the bigger the better) and that isn’t always true!

I think the main reason people write/read fan works is to find/build community. People write fics for a lot of reasons- because they want to express their thoughts, or develop their beliefs, or share a desire, or vent a frustration. And they do those things in specific fandom spaces that inspire them because they feel that it’s fertile ground for whatever the purpose of that work is. And often, even if it’s just a few readers, other people find and connect with that work and sometimes even start a conversation about it and that is how community forms! That’s the main draw, for me at least. And I think conflict comes when it feels like the values of a community have been breached somehow.

Anyway I have like 8000 more thoughts on this but suffice it to say I really liked the shell movie

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Sam’s at it again! If you read AFTG and thought “I’d love for a licensed therapist to take a look at this” this is the fic series 4 u

stranger than your sympathy

All Neil had ever known was his father’s knives and his mother’s guns. He was a stranger to softness. He’d learned to carve it out of himself before anyone else had the chance.

But this something with Andrew- it had started as another sharp, hard forged thing. Bright and shining, yet still something he could understand. But it was changing. Molten in the fevered heat. Neil didn’t know what shape it might take now, how it might feel against his skin. How it would cut him open or bleed him out. How it could hurt or if it could-

If it could be different than anything he’d ever felt before.

———

Hello AFTG fandom! I promised I would return one day to speak the truth of Neil’s mommy issues. Here I am! We’re sending that poor boy to therapy.

Tagging my AFTG mutuals ❤️ @mostlymaudlin @moondal514

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Maybe it’s better to have the terrible times first. I don’t know. Maybe then, you can have, if you live, a better life, a real life, because you had to fight so hard to get it away⸺you know?⸺from the mad dog who held it in his teeth. But then your life has all those tooth marks, too, all those tatters and all that blood.

James Baldwin  This morning, this evening, so soon  

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Thank god Sam is done with dumb things like finishing her novel and getting published so she can get back to what really matters (lesbian fanfic)

We’re back babes!

Chapter 25: A Storm for All Seasons

During the summer of 1974, a series of strange weather events befell England.

Meteorologists the world over scratched their heads over how and why these impossible weather events occurred at all, and in such close succession to one another.

Indeed, no one would have suspected that these mysterious forces of nature were the mischief of four young witches.

The witches never intended for the storms to happen as they did. The storms were merely a byproduct of another wholly altruistic and highly illegal project. They conjured the storms only because they had grown impatient.

By midsummer 1974, Mary, Lily, Marlene and Sirius had completed all but the last step to becoming animagi. As soon as lightning appeared in the sky, the four girls were to swallow their carefully brewed potions, say the carefully practiced incantation, and be granted a vision of an animal in their mind that they would then become.

The only problem was that, by midsummer 1974, England was experiencing a historic drought. There had been no lightning storms- not even so much as a summer sunshower- for nearly a month. By July, the girls were downright restless.

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Sam is back from novel writing to do the important work (gay vampire fanfiction)

Cannot overstate how great the vibe is in this fic, like if an episode of the vampire diaries was thematically coherent 🥲 we love to see it

Alrighty babes, the third chapter of Vampire Au is here!

Chapter 3: waiting for that age of my life

I wrote this to grease the wheels as I get back into fic mode, but I promise the next chapter of True Blue is on its way soon!

A spoiler free moodboard for this chapter:

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The very first passage I highlighted when I read this over the summer! Knocked me off my feet. Always relevant and more so each day

evergreen Jehane take from The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay

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21 & 25 please! :)

21. most memorable comment/review

@capacity-for-wonder left an absolutely iconic comment about how pdsm plays with canon 'like a birdie in a game of badminton, just batting it around for fun,' and I would now like for you all to picture me batting at canon with my giant lynx murder paws <333

25. a fic you read this year that you would recommend everyone read

I began the year with the lovely wolfstar sound of music au by @mostlyoptimisticdinosaur and was just getting so nostalgic for it, would definitely recommend to absolutely everyone!

end of the year asks