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People in my notes keep referencing hornblower sex scenes and as someone who has not yet reached any of these scenes it feels a lot like hearing distant boss music

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I've been thinking about it, and I think what I hate about Jon Kent is that he's genuinely a different person than he was in 2017

If you look at Damian, Jackson, Duke, or Jaime, they've all changed. But crucially, there's an effort to connect these older versions of them with who they were when they were introduced. Damian in 2023 feels like he did in the 2010s just older. His characterization might vary from author to author but the base personality is consistent, and has been for decades. Even Duke, who's character went through a radical change from Robin to Signal, has that same base of being an intense genius who pushes himself to extremes. His appearances in urban legends line up with what we know about him from We Are Robin, almost a decade ago

I know people think Jon was boring in under Tomasi, but he had a personality. He was proud, boisterous, naive, trusting. I feel like people view all kids as having these traits and view 2016 Jon as plain because of this. But plenty of adults have these traits. He could still be a brash and trusting guy while being more mature.

And even if he didn't have a personality... Shouldn't there be an effort to give him one? Any effort? Just a crumb of effort

(note: both times they mention Jon's childhood interests - games and toys and anime - they imply that he's grown past these things or even scold him for watching anime. Nothing more exemplifies how these books are written by out of touch old people than this. Lois commenting on Jon watching anime makes no sense because nowadays that's not noteworthy. It's become normalized for adults to collect toys and love anime and cartoons and that kind of bs. No one with their hand on the pulse has touched this character in a decade lmao)

Instead he just doesn't have a personality anymore. He doesn't have the same interests anymore. And I could appreciate that in a "most people grow out of certain interests and develop new ones" if that's how it was written. But it's not written at all, any character work that could be derived from changes to Jon is just not there.

Jon has become the nothing character people accuse his father of being and the lack of self awareness in that regard is staggering

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Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.

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Owl on Tree Stump by Tejima Keizaburo (1980's)

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experienced chinese patternmakers post their entries include award-winning works (cr: 七禾页老师, DaRan)

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Karadec + Chloe in 1x01

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“Not the dragons. The rats”

happy harlaween @daensa!

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Some Fountains That Are Pretty Amazing.

Osaka Station Fountain-Clock, Osaka, Japan

Water Boat Fountain, Valencia, Spain

Magic Tap, Cadiz, Spain

Vortex Fountain ‘Charybdis’, Sunderland, UK

Cascades Of Hercules Monument, Kassel, Germany

“Tunnel Of Surprises”, Lima, Peru

Keller Fountain, Portland, Oregon, USA

Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara Fountain, Ancient City, Thailand

Fountain At The Smithsonian National Museum Of African American History & Culture, Washington, D.C., USA

Trevi Fountain, Rome, Italy

‘the Divers Fountain’, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Giant - Entrance To The Swarovski Kristallwelten (Crystal Worlds), Wattens, Austria

Banpo Bridge, Seoul, South Korea

‘The Mustangs Of Las Colinas’, Texas, USA

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I have a suspicion HBO wants me, specifically, to suffer with paintovers forever

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helaena targaryen commission for @lawolfe 🫶

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Everything doesn't look so serious when you remember medieval fashion and that every morning in the Red Keep looks like this💙

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estrogen COULD have saved her (finished this)

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“Let him grow taller, she asked the gods. Let him know sixteen, and twenty, and fifty. Let him grow as tall as his father, and hold his own son in his arms. Please, please, please. As she watched him, this tall young man with the new beard and the direwolf prowling at his heels, all she could see was the babe they had laid at her breast at Riverrun, so long ago.”

Esse trecho acabou comigo 👍 catelyn com bebê robb.

eng: This excerpt wrecked me 👍 catelyn and baby robb.

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Auntie mama leaf

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Giovannino dei Grassi and Belbello da Pavia, Visconti Book of Hours

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HOTD if it were a different genre