gatesofminrathous

[gatesofminrathous]

Johanna Hezenkoss vs Caterina Dellamorte is going to be my Super Bowl I am preparing the snacks now

WIP Wednesday

Thanks for the tags @kabsey and @blackwall-my-tiny-husband! @dags-over-caravans you up to anything?

Here's a bit more of the dinner with Caterina chapter.

Lucanis poured himself another glass of wine, steady despite the sudden shift in attention that made him shrink inward. He poured slowly, allowing his focus to shift to the wine as if preventing a single drop from being spilled was the most important task he'd ever had. A different silence settled over the table — curious, dissecting. Everyone was pulling apart the layers of the interaction, and their interest was beyond unwanted.

“It is such a shame we won’t be seeing Spite and your Rook in action, First Talon,” Johanna lamented, voice lightly mocking.

Lucanis didn’t look up. “They’re not my Rook.”

“Not at this time,” Caterina murmured—both confirmation and warning.

Emmrich’s hand twitched, as if resisting the urge to reach for Lucanis. “Spite’s interests are not always rational,” he said. “But they are real. And they can be…informative.”

Caterina turned her gaze on him, eyes hard. “Informative for whom, Professor?”

Emmrich met her stare. “For all of us.”

divider by saradika-graphics

[gatesofminrathous]

"We've got that future of open fields and rucksacks ahead of us."

[gatesofminrathous]

looks inside procrastination -> it's anxiety -> looks inside anxiety -> it's fear -> looks inside fear -> it's shame

[gatesofminrathous]

not to sound like a weak, morally impure centrist over here, but i think online leftist communities need to be a little more accepting of the concept that most people are just. not that well informed. we live in a society that provides access to an overwhelming amount of information and yet which discourages actually diving into much beyond the surface level. Most of the people you meet out in the world are just not gonna know much about a lot of what you care about, but that's not the same as being against those things, or being unwilling to learn, or being unnamenable to those ideas. Our modern society is an unending cascade of information and misinformation and disinformation and filtering through that shit enough to actually have a solid grasp of a subject, let alone a nuanced antiestablishment political take, is a skill that takes time and effort to develop, time and effort that is in very short supply. It really bothers me when I see leftists talk about how capitalism keeps us down by taking up all our time and energy and making recovery, both physical and emotional, cost what little we can afford, and then turn around and get upset that people are politically uninformed. On some level, you gotta meet some people where they are, and have a little faith in them to be open to new ideas and information. Ignorance is not inherently intentional, and it's not the same as antipathy.

[gatesofminrathous]

Look, pal, when I say "fanfiction does not have the cultural reach to be able to change social perceptions of controversial topics"

what I mean is "if Game of Thrones could not manage to normalize incest, a handful of shipcest fics on AO3 with 50 kudos each sure aren't going to manage to normalize it!"

And you know that. In your heart you know it.

[gatesofminrathous]

The Milfs/Dilfs of Dragon Age (Veilguard edition)

I'm currently selling these as stickers and donating all earnings to Eman Abuhayya's gfm to help the remaining members of her family evacuate Gaza - or donate to her directly here!

[gatesofminrathous]

the world's most decent little princess

[gatesofminrathous]

asking for praise for a thing you made feels so humiliating like oooh look at me I’m a little animal and I did a trick and made a thing can I have pets and treats about it. and then somebody tells you it’s good and you understand why golden retrievers are the way they are

[gatesofminrathous]

L'insoumise

[gatesofminrathous]

sorry I'm about to be petty again. it does drive me insane when I'm talking about interpretations of a text and someone comes back with a social media screenshot like it's an argument-ending trump card. I'm actually here to engage with the story that was published, not with what a stressed-out dev said during a reddit ama or any of David Gaider's million tweets

[gatesofminrathous]

wrote this in my notes app because I was on a flight and didn’t have wifi and then forgot about it

[gatesofminrathous]

hang on I’m trying to see something

don’t tell me the name of your pet, just tell me in the tags the name you call them that’s got nothing to do with their actual name

[gatesofminrathous]

[gatesofminrathous]

I’m gonna need y’all to start commenting on fics you enjoyed. Like for fucking real. I’m serious. The kudos isn’t enough. You have got to tell people you appreciate the work they’ve done because they will, in fact, assume it’s not being appreciated or seen.

[gatesofminrathous]

My feelings about queernormative worlds in SFF is that I can often enjoy it, but I rarely believe it.

Almost everything surrounding gender, sex, and sexuality, and all the different social norms and expectations that different cultures build up around them, derive ultimately from the various realities of sexual activity and pregnancy: who can have it, who can’t, for how long, who does have it, who doesn’t, and what that means for society. I’m not being bioessentialist here, because human bodies are all quite different and different cultures develop different ways to react to that, and rates of and reactions to fertility can be different, and what different sexual and gender roles mean in different cultures and who can and can’t embody them can get extremely different. (Hell, how pregnancy itself even works can be different depending on where you live, what your lifestyle is like, and what your diet consists of!) But like, the reason gender even matters, historically, has been because of reproduction. And the reason reproduction matters, in agricultural societies anyway, has very often been because of property ownership and the need to work on farms.

So I’m totally here for queernormative worlds. But to interest me you have to answer the questions of: okay, but how does your culture work though, and how is kinship structured, and how is reproduction seen, and how is property inheritance understood, and how does gender fit into all this, for me to feel like you’ve actually tried. (And don’t say that there ARE no norms, so no one falls outside of them. There’s no culture where that’s true.)

Sci-fi worlds can get away with this easier than fantasy worlds, imo. Partially because they can posit that it is our future but we’ve gone through all of the Social Justice Struggles already and solved them, but also because technology can really alter all of these topics. The Vorkosigan Saga, for instance, makes it clear that Beta Colony is as gender-egalitarian and free-love as it is because of contraception and uterine replicators, which FULLY decouple “the ability to have children” from “the need for anyone to be pregnant.” This is huge, and the Vorkosigan Saga treats it as appropriately so! Ancillary Justice is another one that thinks a lot about how the genderless culture that decenters romance as a core social organizing principle works. But I read so many low-ish-tech fantasy worlds that are happily queernormative and gender doesn’t matter and they just feel shallow. I don’t believe this world. I don’t dislike it, exactly, I just don’t believe it, I don’t believe people would be like this because you’ve put no effort into imagining a world that works like this makes any sense.

Which is totally fine for people’s D&D games and cute oneshot comics and personal works and such, but when you want me to take your worldbuilding seriously, you’re going to have to convince me! And a lot of it is not convincing.

[gatesofminrathous]

i poke fun at my dog bc she acts like she HATES walks when im trying to get her harness and leash on her- like rag dolls and refuses to move so i have to pick her up and physically put her outside instead of just. walking the two steps out the door. but when she does get outside she's like oh wait this is awesome let's go! cmon hurry up! anyway i have just had the realization that this is also my approach to writing, so i can't actually, like, make fun of her too much for this. even though it is very funny. sigh