its-leethee

[its-leethee]

fresh out the slammer

summary: Ezran takes Claudia out horseback riding. co-written by me and @thosefiveadoraburrs a/n: title from taylor swift song of the same name. set as always about 13-15 years post S7. cool kids will find the spider riders (2006) reference Rated: T word count: 3.3k

“You should get out of the castle.”

Claudia sighed, smiling to herself among the rows of books in her study, searching for just the right one. “Are you sure this isn’t just an excuse for you to take a break, Your Majesty?” 

“It’s not just an excuse,” Ezran said, leaning confidently against her doorway when she stole a glance at him through the gaps between shelves. After years apart and just over one back in the same place together, she wasn’t sure if she’d ever get used to how tall he’d become. “They say fresh air is good for you.”

Claudia laughed, attention fully diverted from the shelves. “Who is ‘they’, anyway?”

“Whoever they are, they’ve been saying it for as long as I can remember. So?”

Claudia walked back over to her desk, gazing at him and the weariness amid the crinkling of his eyes. “Opeli driving you a bit crazy, then?”

His shoulders eased. “I just really can’t look at more legislation today, I think.” His eyes lingered on her, as they always did, and then skirted to her windows. She’d wanted a study with big windows and lots of natural light, after... everything. “Especially when it’s the first nice day we’ve really had.” 

She watched his blue eyes, wistful as they looked out past the castle walls. Not quite like before—they’d both grown too much for that, even without the wear of the past several years behind them—but still soft and eager enough that the look reminded her a bit of simpler, greener times.

“Well,” she said, getting up, “they do say fresh air is good for you, and we can’t have our king deficient.”

He looked back at her with a bright smile. “So you’ll come along?”

“For an hour at most. I don’t need to give Opeli another reason to want to kill me.” She brushed back her hair, knowing she needed to touch up her black dye soon. “So—what did you have in mind?”

read the rest on AO3

[its-leethee]

anyway the TDP fandom has always been majority white online and had an issue with casual to blatant fandom racism since day 1, from fans focusing pre and post-S1 on white characters & dynamics (Soren&Claudia, elf fam, etc.) drastically more than our two lead characters of colour, demonizing Black characters (esp Black men/boys in the show like Corvus, Ezran, and Harrow) to make white characters look better, tagging Ezran routinely in posts that are not about him at all actually, not engaging with more collectivist leaning plotlines or settings (ie. Sunfire elves) with the same amount of grace and interest given to more individualist leaning settings (i.e. the Silvergrove banishing Rayla without a trial for the deaths of 5 community members vs Rayla being watched by Katolis guard for... poking around her boyfriend's study, & then arrested without notice or a trial; guess which setting the fandom routinely gives more grace & second chances to!), treating Callum like a white guy (he's not) or like he's "not Asian enough" (which is also deeply hurtful); the way the pain of white characters will be often elevated above the characters of colour they hurt in the first place (falling 100% into patterns that Black fans have noticed across numerous fandoms about how darker skinned characters of colour are consistently portrayed/dismissed in fandom as unreasonable for being pissed at white and/or lighter-skinned antagonists), and lastly the erasure of my real life filipino partner as a co-author of 28+ of our fics on a routine basis that i've had to correct people over and over again for, and who left the fandom like 4 years ago because the racism was that bad and hasn't, honestly, gotten better since.

while fandom behaviour ≠ activism and fiction ≠ reality, how you engage with a text and how you operate in fandom can absolutely be a reflection of your own internal bias(es), particularly if it's a pattern, and thereby present chances and opportunities to work through and engage with things differently once you notice your patterns if they exist. for ex, when i first started editing the show graphics wise, i did Not know how to edit with respect to not whitewashing ezran. i've learned since then (it was like back in 2019/2020ish), and it was a good Learning experience i've incorporated while editing other characters in the show, too.

all of the shit above is not worth getting defensive or uppity over "omg maybe i'll be seen as a Bad Person" because learning to not moralize racism 99/100 times, especially, when it's about your own actions, is really important in letting go of defensiveness. you should always be more concerned with Doing a racist thing than ''''Being Perceived''' just potentially as a racist, anyway.

[its-leethee]

Y’all I’m going to CRY- CHAPTER 2 I’m-

[its-leethee]

sometimes I can't believe this series includes a multi-day stretch where two teenage girls try to fake being nice to each other in front of a boy who thinks they're both pretty, and yet the moment with the most off-the-charts level of immaculately-honed cattiness in the entire seven seasons is an old man delivering the literal equivalent of "I see you've finally stopped getting your outfits at the thrift shop."

[its-leethee]

[its-leethee]

I was trying to think of a way to explain why this is stupid and also ghoulish. I think I came up with something.

Imagine you are an engineer designing body armor. You are tasked with making sure the body armor can stop 10 different types of bullets. In your first attempt, you create body armor that stops 6 of the 10 bullets. You start selling those because that's pretty good protection. You can save some lives while you continue to improve things.

You already know how to stop 6 bullets, but you really want to figure out how to stop the last 4. So you do exactly what you did before, but add a few more layers of Kevlar and a steel plate.

Your boss, RFK Jr., says he wants a test of the new and improved body armor. But he says you have to give one test subject the real thing and the other test subject fake body armor that does nothing.

And you're like, "Hey, can I at least give them the body armor that stops 6 bullets? We already know that gives some protection. We only need to compare the new armor to what we already accomplished."

And RFK says, "No, please shoot a person dead. It's science."

[its-leethee]

Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Saturn, 25.01.25, by Manusia dan Langit (composite picture of the alignment also called “planet parade”)

[its-leethee]

the more things change

[its-leethee]

All was dark.

It never had been before— not for him.

There were always constellations behind his eyelids, threads that wove glimpses of futures that could come to pass. They often shifted, rippling like spiderwebs in the breeze, his visions holding as much permanence as the reflections of passing clouds in a pond. It was a gift which required divining to translate. To tease meaning or guidance from whispers of words that may never be spoken was risky, but the possibilities he witnessed always served to inform him.

For all to fall silent and still was eerie.

Wrong.

There was nothing to touch when he reached into the dark. It stretched into eternity no matter how far he ran or pushed forward. This darkness, encompassing all, even swallowed himself.

How was it possible for him to look down and not even see his hand, which always shone with the light of his stars?

Even as he dwelt in Xadia again, at last able to breathe the air imbued with the light of every Arcanum which passed through it, his connection to his own birthright, the stars, seemed to be fraying.

Could it be them, snipping his strings, covering his eyes?

The rest on AO3

[its-leethee]

“I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school. Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there’s a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it’s a matter of aesthetics and it’s a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they’re so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another. So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that’s a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that “Why is the world so beautiful?” is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Intelligence of Plants”, from the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett (via peatbogbodyhasmoved)

[its-leethee]

To go on without her would mean an eternity of pain. / It's okay. Go on without me. / But in that moment, I chose to live. / I don't think I can do it without him.

[its-leethee]

today's bug thing is this giant beetle sculpture!

[its-leethee]

my mom's in a pokemon go battle right now in the other room saying a whole shonen protagonist speech

[its-leethee]

the whole "lipstick on a pig" thing makes no sense because the second we gave a pig access to makeup she became god's cuntiest soldier

[its-leethee]

Why are you using chatgpt to get through college. Why are you spending so much time and money on something just to be functionally illiterate and have zero new skills at the end of it all. Literally shooting yourself in the foot. If you want to waste thirty grand you can always just buy a sportscar.

[its-leethee]

I would like to live in uninteresting times, please.