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I think another thing to keep in mind re: Diana's fatness is that she's like. Not actually that fat lol. She weighs, canonically, 150 lbs. She might be SLIGHTLY visually chubby. I weighed 150 lbs before my huge weight gain, and I'm 5'4, a very average height (also about the average height in the 1880s) and when I was that weight, I was still pretty small. And like, yeah, beauty standards through out time etc etc, but also I think we need to remember what 150 lbs actually looks like.

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every writer has That One Scene that lives in their head rent-free but they can’t write it yet because “the vibes aren’t ripe”

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Elizabeth Bennet: the first impression I had of Mr Darcy prevented me from realising how wrong I was about him for so long! Hah, I thought myself clever, but I am just another fool!

Anne Shirley: how long is “so long”, exactly?

Elizabeth Bennet: months!

Anne Shirley, who spent years holding a grudge before realising how wrong she was about Gilbert: nah, I think you are good!

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sorry i thought about gilbert blythe for a moment and blacked out

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so I decided to become an IBCLC (internationally board certified lactation consultant) and i was like oh yay if I buckle down it'll only take me a few months to complete the education requirements (95-120 hrs) and clinical experience (500 hours) and then sit the exam!! WRONG !! I didnt know i needed to have a bunch of college credits in specific health related classes before even attempting the lactation specific education !!! so I guess I'm going back to college! AGAIN!!! (first time I was kicked out bc I never went to classes.... second time I dropped out bc I realized I hated it.... third time I dropped out bc my dad got cancer....) I'm really hopeful about this time though because I'm like. Better at handling things? And I hate college and I hate school but I truly do WANT to be a lactation consultant!! It is a future that makes me excited!! Also I was just informed by the family i nanny for that their kid is entering daycare in September so I'm gonna have to find a new job then-- I know I'm gonna end up nannying because noooothing else pays even CLOSE to what I make nannying but if I could find a job with health insurance I would freaaaaak out (excitedly)

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Some favourite Dr. Gilbert Blythe moments, spanning from Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley, and The Blythes are Quoted, all by L.M. Montgomery

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Anne of Green Gables 🌿🌸

Patreon postcard for March! Join here.

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Anne of the Island by L.M. Montgomery

I love Gilbert standing on business like this. It took him all of maybe an hour, after hearing Anne reciprocated his feelings, for him to properly kiss her. Meanwhile, in The Blythes Are Quoted, we learn that Roy didn’t accomplish this much in two years. Gilbert was Anne’s first.

Here, on the subject of kisses:

The Blythes are Quoted by L.M. Montgomery

Lmao. I remember being sooo surprised the first time I read this. Two! Years! With! Roy! And! Zero! Kisses! And although I can admit this little fact is probably more attributable to the strength of Victorian decorum than anything else (and of course it also speaks to Roy being quite a decent and honourable fellow), idkkk I just think it reinforces the hints we got that poor Mister Gardner and Anne’s relationship was a rather dry and passionless thing overall, for all the performative romance between them.

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obsessed with miss cornelia

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Random Gilbert Blythe moments: 289/?

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being a fan of something with like 30 total fans on tumblr is funny bc you get like 12 notes on a post and you're like wow the gang's all here

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Modern Anne of Green Gables AU where Anne accidentally serves Diana Marilla’s medicinal pot brownies and Mrs. Barry is like WHY do you even have those in the house you ancient STONER and Marilla is like (a) I have glaucoma and (b) to be fair Diana would have also gotten sick from eating that many regular brownies. Meanwhile Diana’s sitting there hallucinating her own birth. It’s a good time.

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Any thoughts on Shirley’s relationship with Susan compared to Anne and the way he starts calling Susan “Mother Susan”? I kinda feel like Susan stole one of Anne kids ☠️

Omg a million thoughts.

I think for Shirley, or any other more minor canon character that doesn’t get a huge amount of time in the spotlight, that it’s easy for readers to grab onto sparse canon fragments and expound on them tenfold because really – it’s all you have. For instance say X character is mentioned only twice in a novel, and each time they happened to be wearing pink sunglasses… now in fanon the jump is “X’s favourite colour is pink, and they only wear pink because they love it so much, and they always dreamed of having pink hair…” (this is a supremely stupid example, but you know what I mean?) and so on, and imo you can get really exaggerated versions of certain characters this way. And I do think this is sometimes the case with Shirley (even though it’s an impulse I understand, and one born out of necessity), and this is how we end up with some believing or thinking Shirley isn’t as much of a Blythe as the rest of his family, or that he prefers Susan to Anne, or that he isn’t very close to Anne, or even as you say, that he continued to call Susan “mother Susan” after the war. When really, we have no textual evidence to support that it did continue. It’s one of those things like yeah sure, it is possible… but it’s equally as possible that it didn’t. (And I personally doubt that it did. When I read that scene, I see a moment where Shirley is declaring for his girl, so to speak. He isn’t sure if he’ll come back from his service – after all, Walter already didn’t – and he wants Susan to know she’s been/is a Mother to him. There were many different types of ‘good-byes’ and ‘thank-yous’ to be said before boys went on to wear khaki for their country. It’s perfectly natural that Shirley would’ve done this for Susan, and it is very very sweet.)

It’s interesting though with Maud, because she does provide a lot of surrogate-type mothers in her books and short stories, and while she effortlessly proves the ferocity of the strength of these found-family bonds, she also can draw some pretty firm lines there. Like when Marilla won’t permit Anne call her “aunt Marilla,” because Marilla doesn’t believe in calling people by names or titles that don’t belong to them. For Shirley, there’s that line in Rainbow Valley narrative where Maud gives the ole air-quote to Susan’s “mothering” of Shirley – put there to pointedly differentiate from plain mothering.

Rainbow Valley by L.M. Montgomery

My own preoccupation on this subject has always been like, welllll what about Shirley? What did he feel? And it’s again, very hard to resolutely say. We just know too little. We only know Susan’s feelings. Like at the end of Anne of Ingleside, when Anne and Gilbert leave for a second honeymoon, and Shirley goes with Susan to her sisters house instead of Avonlea with the rest of the bigger kids… the text doesn’t tell us that this was necessarily Shirley’s choice. It doesn’t say, “Shirley wanted…”, instead it says: “Susan took…” (btw I don’t mean this to reflect poorly on Susan, only highlighting that it doesn’t give us any insight into Shirley’s feelings lol). Meanwhile, we do have examples of Susan putting Shirley to bed each night and ‘allowing’ Anne to on special occasion, but even in those, we also emphatically hear that Shirley still wants Anne to be the one tucking him in, despite it all.

Anne of Ingleside by L.M. Montgomery

Then we’ll flip-flop and have something like Shirley going to Susan about his bumps and scrapes, and to avoid “well deserved” spankings… which all things considered, this is a less of a motherly trait, so much as an indulgent grandmotherly trait (keep in mind, Susan was described as ‘elderly’ back in HOD days).

🫠 So yeah lmao all this to say/for the TLDR, at least for me and what can be fairly deducted from the text, that Anne and Susan are basically equals in the matter of Bringing Up Shirley… and that we definitely can’t say it’s canon that Susan is an usurper (or baby stealer!) of Anne in this way.

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You are faced with some random problem and the only person who can help you is the main character from the last piece of media you consumed (you can also do favorite character if there are multiple main characters). You can stay in this universe or be in the universe of the character, whichever you prefer, but the problem remains the same and the only person who can directly help you is the main character. That character can call on the help of those they know in their media, but when it comes down to it, they are the only person really helping you. How do you react to this situation?

Spin to find out your problem:

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*submitted by @firstgradecrushes (thank you!), and requested as a 24 hour poll

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Dress, 1937. Charles James.

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This reread of Anne of the island, I’m struck when she finds the letters her parents sent each other. Specifically the one about her as a baby.

She was so so so loved. Anne imagines her mother praying and hoping and waiting to meet her little girl, going through the pains of labour, being delighted in her baby, and then being taken away too soon.

Compare this with Anne’s house of dreams where Anne is in the role of mother. Praying and hoping and waiting to meet her little girl, suffering through labour, being delighted in her baby, but this time it’s the baby taken away.

Both times Anne is left bereft.