daceytheshebear

[daceytheshebear]

I love self-referential statements where you just say the name of the thing you wish to express and it counts as having expressed the thing so named. Apologies. Greetings. Fair warning. We should be able to do that with more things, I think.

[daceytheshebear]

yeah actually we removed the big bad wolf from the little red riding hood story because portraying violence against minors is really messed up. yeah. yeah also the wolf narrative was really predatory and had had some icky grooming vibes and a fable meant for literal children shouldn’t have implied p*do shit and grape so now little red riding hood goes into the woods and nothing happens and she goes to grandma’s house. don’t worry our kids will still stick to the path and know not to follow to wolves implicitly because we told them to and children should always do as their told. just like little red riding hood does now.

[daceytheshebear]

I mean now that Jaime Lannister is roaming in the riverlands maybe he can come across Edmure's best friends Karl and Marx, I mean Karyl and Marq, I mean Karyl Vance and Marq Piper.

isekaing into asoiaf universe to teach jaime lannister that according immortal science of marxism leninism killing king aerys was a radical revolutionary act shaking the foundations of feudal system

[daceytheshebear]

Headcanon corvus braided his hair 😭😭😭

Some Soren concepts from The Dragon Prince Twitter

[daceytheshebear]

asoiaf characters who are canonically pro choice:

margaery tyrell (moon tea enthusiast)

grand maester pycelle (moon tea supplier)

catelyn stark (feminist. wishes jon had been aborted)

jon snow (male feminist. wishes he had been aborted)

melisandre (uses aborted shadow babies as murder weapons)

everyone in dorne (chronically based)

cersei lannister (had a coathanger abortion because her husband had bad vibes)

asha greyjoy (2 steps away from inventing the IUD)

val (late term abortion advocate)

characters who are pro abortion but NOT pro choice:

hoster tully

[daceytheshebear]

🩺

[daceytheshebear]

The girl was the older and taller of the two. Arya! Bran thought eagerly, as he watched her leap up onto a rock and cut at the boy. But that couldn’t be right. If the girl was Arya, the boy was Bran himself, and he had never worn his hair so long. And Arya never beat me playing swords, the way that girl is beating him .

— ADWD, Bran III

What kills me about this scene is that Bran didn't realize the girl wasn't Arya because they weren't that similar, but because the boy she was playing with wasn't him. This also means that Bran and Arya used to play with swords, and that's so dear to me.

[daceytheshebear]

[daceytheshebear]

i love my two sons podrick payne and josmyn peckledon. pod & peck. heroes of the blackwater and faithful squires to valorous knights. kingsguard abolition notwithstanding they get two of the seven spots in my future kg predictions.

[daceytheshebear]

The Writing Cycle

7:00 AM: I’m gonna be productive and write a whole chapter today!

1:00 PM: I’ll make some progress on the chapter later tonight.

11:00 PM: …I’ll just get some sleep and write in the morning…

12:00 AM: Fuck I can’t sleep.

3:00 AM: OH SWEET JESUS HAS GIVEN ME INSPIRATION PRAISE THE HEAVENS

3:01 AM: *writes a sentence and proceeds to take a break that will soon span months*

[daceytheshebear]

👆🏼👆🏼👆🏼 it works ok

Leave comments, send emails, approach people in conferences, ask questions after open lectures. Let people know what you thought of their work. It's a good habit.

should be able to leave kudos on scientific studies. i liked your paper dude keep at it

[daceytheshebear]

Also written stories are the safest possible way to come in contact with genuinely upsetting things in a non-traumatizing way. Reading requires active engagement, differently from watching a movie or listening to a song. It's much easier to stop reading than it is to continue. Reading requires effort, it requires wanting to know more. And guess what. If that kid is still reading, if they want to know more, it's probably because they can – even if what they find is somewhat disturbing.

I have really vivid memories of a book I read when I was about 9 that had the main character, a young boy, being psychologically abused by his father and then witnessing his father cheat on his mother. His father stopped the car in the middle of the road to get rid of the boy's beloved dog!! He yelled and was aggressive and told his son he was stupid and a coward and soft and terrible. I remember feeling so bad about it all. But it was... Cathartic, too. It wasn't me living through that. I remember reading slowly, stopping when it got too much, coming back to the book later. I can totally project that a movie with the same exact plot would probably have been inappropriate for me to watch at that age. But the book. I remember hating it. And loving it. I remember having really complicated feelings I had to sort through and make sense of. I remember talking to my friends about this book, exchanging stories about how we felt and what we thought. And that's really enriching. That's what I read for, to this day. Not only that. I like following a silly plot and witnessing fluffy romance, I like complicated fantasy mysteries and beautiful prose... But what I love most are books that break my heart a little. And then I get to put it back together and relish in being human. And I learned that so young. I'm grateful.

(Also my school had a really weird reading program when I was about 11 and 12 and I read so much fiction that contained sex and drug use and alcohol abuse and people living in abject poverty at that age... honestly it was quite weird, but also it did not traumatize me or any of my school mates... just made us awere such things existed, which they do)

On the subject about parents needing to control their child's reading and invade their privacy in order to "protect" them from "inappropriate material:

Until I was in....college? At least? The vast, vast majority of the books I read were either a) assigned by my school or b) (the vast majority of my reading) provided to me by my mother.

My mom is a librarian. She filled our rooms with books, picked especially for us. She pointed out books on the shelves in our home library (separate from our bedroom shelves) that she thought we would like. She bought us books for birthdays, Christmas, and just stacks of recommendations. She once paid me $10 to read one of the Cirque Du Freak books because she said I needed "to be exposed to bad literature."

She respected my privacy in room, didn't go through my belongings. She explicitly pointed out to us that she wouldn't know if we took a particular book of the shelf, as long as we returned it, if we didn't want her to know we were reading it. She purposely brought us books that she didn't care for herself, because she thought we might find them valuable or enjoyable.

And if we wanted to read something she thought might upset or disturb us, she would explain why. She wouldn't stop us from reading it - just ask us to check in with her, to talk through it.

And so when I read something that upset or disturbed me, I would go to her. She would listen and talk through it with me.

If she said she didn't think I would like something, or that a book might disturb me, or that she thought I should wait until I was older, I listened to her.

She didn't need restrictions or control to protect me. Because she proved I could trust her.

Controlling kids is never about "protecting" them. It's just about control.

[daceytheshebear]

God Bless people who dress wild and go out in public. I love seeing a woman in all pink with pink hair and pink nails, with a tiny dog in a pink outfit in her bag. Or a massively goth dude covered in piercings sporting a giant green mohawk. Cosplayers. SCA reenactors. Ren Faire people. There’s nothing I love more than a pair of handsome young men walking around in Revolutionary War outfits. Just please keep dressing wild and freaky. You bring color to life, and it never fails to put a big smile on my face.

[daceytheshebear]

"Fantasy authors don't know how long a thousand years is!!!!!! Knock a zewo off the end!!!!!!!111!!!1" Did you know that it's never too late to learn whimsy and joy

[daceytheshebear]

Renly is kind of hollow and useless, sure, be he shows that Brienne likes pretty, sassy boys.

[daceytheshebear]

give your characters exes.

give them a variety of exes. give them relationships that shaped who they are but did not last. give them people they tried very hard to love but it didn't work out. give them situationships that taught them things. give them something deep that was real but could not endure. things that hurt. things that ended amicably. people with whom hot passion cooled to warm affection and became undying friendship.

no more first and only. give me the context of what made them know the next or one after was final and right.

[daceytheshebear]

I think the ultimate fantasy that people have when depicting Brienne is thinking 'Well *I* wouldn't think she was ugly just because she doesn't fit medieval Westerosi beauty standards. In fact, I would think she was HOT!' OK. Cool. Would you still respect her if you did, in fact, think she was ugly though? Or is morality tied up with appearance still, just behind one additional layer of abstraction?