rollingless

[rollingless]

Why I ignore canon

Some months ago I got heavily invested in a show called The 100. What drew me in most of all was the promised romantic relationship between the female protagonist and another female character. Imagine. In a show aimed at the general public, at young people, there was to be a romantic relationship between the main female character (Clarke) and another woman (Lexa). What’s not to love?

The creator of the show was very vocal about this pair. He made statements about them in social media. He defended their connection. He made it clear the writers were not looking to create a triangle drama between Clarke, Lexa and Bellamy, one of Clarke’s male friends. He came out as saying he personally ships Clexa. 

The romantic relationship started to develop in an appropriately subtle manner. There was betrayal. We, the viewers, didn’t think Clarke could ever forgive Lexa, but she did. They shared a bed, had sex, were intimate and vulnerable and shared stories of their lives. They became a couple. 

Two minutes after that scene Lexa died. She was hit by a stray bullet that was intended for Clarke and she bled out in Clarke’s arms. 

Now, Clarke’s mother is a doctor and earlier in the show she was able to talk Clarke through saving the life of her previous romantic interest (a man, of course) who had been stabbed with a poisoned dagger. But as Lexa lay dying, Clarke did nothing, barely even lifted a finger to help her.

After this the creator of the show started making new kinds of statements on social media, saying that while Clarke was Lexa’s soulmate, Lexa wasn’t Clarke’s. That’s that. Time to start paving the way for Clarke’s eventual relationship with Bellamy, who also conveniently lost his girlfriend at that same time.

The first thing I’ve learned from consuming media meant for the general public is that people like me are never the protagonists of any story, that we are lucky to be the protagonist’s best friend, and more likely to be simply living in the same city as them. I’ve learned to expect that the queerness of characters is either ignored completely or made the only thing of interest about the queer character.

Let me just pause here and say that writing a queer character and giving no indication in the actual story that you’re writing of that character’s queerness is not sufficient queer representation. When Rowling came out saying Dumbledore is gay, it didn’t make Dumbledore a significant queer character in literature because there is nothing in any of the actual books that would make anyone think that Dumbledore is gay – unless you count the fact that at the age of 150 he is still living alone without ever having found anyone to share his life with.

I’m by no means saying that making the decision to live alone doesn’t guarantee happiness. There is absolutely nothing about living alone that means you can’t be perfectly happy in your life, and for some people it’s the only way to be happy. That is all fine. But I can’t help finding it disturbing how often people who create media for the general public seem to be incapable of imagining queer people having storylines that end happily, and especially storylines that don’t end with someone dying.

Now, as many of you may have gathered from my blog and my fics and my overall presence in the fandom, I ship eruri. I ship them romantically, I love the bond they have in canon. I have loved learning how they met, how their relationship started out, how it developed, how they behave around each other when no one else is there. I know that they are not a confirmed canon couple, but to me they are two same-sex main characters who have a profound relationship and, considering how little there is for me to relate to in media, I’m going to take that and I’m going to run with it as far as my legs will carry me. But even with everything I’ve loved about the manga I have been wary. I have kept reading but always been waiting for the moment when it all turns. And now here we are. The worst has happened.

But my years and years of consuming media have taught me a unique skill: ignoring canon. From all the dissatisfying stories that deny people like me the happy endings we have in real life I have learned to fall in love with the worlds other people build and the characters they craft but to ignore their stories when they start to ignore me and other people like me. I have learned to pick and choose what I like and construct my own stories out of those elements, stories that I would like to hear, stories that don’t marginalise and abuse people like me.

And this is what I love the most about fandom culture: that people come together to share and appreciate the stories that most people refuse to tell or even to hear, to tell the stories that no one will publish because they’re not “marketable”, to find the happy endings that others won’t give us and to find agency in writing out our own pain in our own words.

Every time I have to turn to ignoring canon is sad. With every story I fall in love with I hope I won’t have to. Never has this been more true than with Attack on Titan, and with so many things to love about the story, I will probably continue reading it, if for no other reason then simply to find out what becomes of Historia and Ymir. But I will not allow the development in chapter 84 ruin Erwin and Levi’s relationship for me. I don’t care if I have to ignore half the things in the manga from here on out. I don’t care if seeing what Levi did as an act of kindness and love makes no sense. I simply don’t care. Instead I will take all the skills that I’ve learned over the years, and I will put them to good use.

[rollingless]

Guys, guys … the recitations of the Iliad and the Odyssey that I watched a few years ago are back online!! At two events, the Iliad and the Odyssey were read by a a row of actors, each of them reading between 5 - 30 minutes (and among them are some famous ones, too, like Ian McKellen and Stanley Tucci!). I already mentioned how amazing it is to be able to listen to these epics being read out loud.

They were taken down about 2 years ago but now they are back up again! You can find the Iliad here and the Odyssey here. 

[rollingless]

[rollingless]

I’m glad every new Kuroshitsuji chapter comes with an appropriate reaction image

[rollingless]

Art by マツバキ

※ Posted with written permission ※ Do not repost or remove the source

[rollingless]

Okay so I am full of dead gay husband feels so prepare to have your dash spammed by Koltira and Thassarian

but for those of you who don’t play World of Warcraft you have no idea who these zombie cuties are, so some introductions are in order.

Thassarian was a paladin, a knight of Holy Light, way back when the Lich King was first gearing up and the Scourge was rolling over the land. He fought in battle, died, and was raised again as an unholy Death Knight to serve the Lich King. Plot point: when you are a Death Knight you are subject to telepathic control or at least very strong telepathic influence from the Lich King, so you don’t really have free will.

One of the things that Thassarian was ordered to do was to go back and kill all his former comrades, which he did – except for Koltira Spellweaver, an elven mage in his old platoon. Even though he was ordered to kill him, what he did instead was convert him to be a Death Knight like him, serving the Lich King, because even if it meant Koltira (now Deathweaver) would hate him for all eternity, he still thought that was better than losing Koltira from the world entirely.

You can see this is getting off to a great start.

OK, so, that’s where things stand when you the player meet these dudes in the Death Knight story zone. The Scourge is battling against the remnants of the Scarlet Crusade, bunch of religious whackjobs that they are. Koltira has gone and gotten himself captured, and Thassarian is fretting like a mother hen. He asks you, the player, to pretty please go rescue his boyfriend ‘brother’ because despite the fact that you are all evil zombies serving an evil zombie king, Koltira is still his boyfriend brother.

You go off and invade the Scarlet Crusade headquarters and find Koltira, notably shirtless, in the process of being tortured for information. He’s surprised to see someone actually bothered to come get him, and grateful to hear that Thassarian sent you, so that he risks himself to cause a distraction so that you can leave safely. When you get back to base, Koltira and Thassarian are hanging out together, Koltira displaying a remarkable lack of resentment over the whole murdered-and-condemned-to-a-hellish-undead-existence thing.

This becomes a pattern: Koltira gets himself captured, Thassarian worries, and asks the player to go rescue him from whatever shirt-free torture dungeon he’s been kidnapped to this time. I really have no choice but to draw a couple of conclusions from this:

 Koltira is a really, really terrible Death Knight. (I suppose it’s not really his fault, he was a caster before he died, what does he know about wearing plate and swinging broadswords?)

This was about the time period when Blizzard was just beginning to notice for the first time that they had female players, and were attempting in rather clumsy ways to capitalize on this fact by inserting female gaze bait into their games.

Thassarian and Koltira are hella married.

Anyway, time and the story go on, and Cataclysm rolls around, and Thassarian and Koltira reluctantly go their separate ways in order to return to their respective factions. Since Thassarian is human (Alliance) and Koltira is a blood elf (Horde,) they wind up as commanders of battalions on opposite sides of a skirmish at a place called Andorhal.

It’s all very tragic and star-crossed, and if you (the player) sneak along with either of the commanders you get to eavesdrop on a secret rendezvous between Koltira and Thassarian where they lament the cursed war that has separated them and basically make a mutual pact not to attack each other too hard, lest the other get hurt. After all, though the fortunes of war have pitted them against each other, they are still boyfriends brothers.

Unfortunately for our star-crossed zombie husbands, the Horde leader – Sylvanas – catches them in the act, and as punishment for his betrayal, a portal opens up and you and a horrified Thassarian watch as magical chains emerge from it to drag Koltira off to the dungeons below the Undercity, there to be suitably punished. I’d like to state, for the record, that Sylvannas and the Undercity and the Forsaken in general are horribly unpleasant enough even if you haven’t gotten on their shitlist and ended up in their power.

At the end of the cutscene, Thassarian swears that he’s going to get Koltira back.

And that’s how things stood for the next two expansion packs. From 2010 to 2016, for SIX YEARS, Koltira languishes in a dungeon while Thassarian devotes himself to a fruitless quest to rescue his boyfriend brother.

AND NOW.

TODAY.

TODAY’S THE DAY.

As of Legion, in the Death Knight order hall, THIS STORYLINE FINALLY GETS RESOLVED. Once your character gets elected Deathlord, Thassarian takes you aside and pleads for a personal favor: help him bust into Undercity to rescue Koltira. You do so, and to nobody’s surprise, find him languishing shirtlessly in Sylvanas’ torture lab.

Koltira is rescued!

FUCKING FINALLY.

And so the saga ends with the two dead gay husbands hanging out together once more in the Death Knight home base, going out on missions together and wreaking havoc, and I am fucking STOKED.

[rollingless]

[Character has little to no concrete backstory]

Fanfic writers:

[rollingless]

Coming into a fandom late

[rollingless]

Fanfiction is the madwoman in mainstream culture’s attic, but the attic won’t contain it forever. Writing and reading fanfiction isn’t just something you do; it’s a way of thinking critically about the media you consume, of being aware of all the implicit assumptions that a canonical work carries with it, and of considering the possibility that those assumptions might not be the only way things have to be.

Anne Jamison, Fic: Why Fan Fiction is Taking Over the World. (via fanstudiesnetwork)

[rollingless]

[rollingless]

some fuckin genius at type-moon who has earned my respect for an eternity:

[rollingless]

I won’t let you be grumpy.

credit: @riepoyonn

[rollingless]

A third coffee. Paper dry hands. A wasting highlighter. An alarmingly low word count and a Beautiful Man. A flash of grey. A weary afternoon sigh.

That’s how it usually goes. The most taxing nine to five he has ever known.

He is allowed four hours of productivity before the Beautiful Man strides in. 1pm every working day, like clockwork, like the world waits for him and starts when he starts and time is but a plaything in his hands.

Erwin waits for him too.

He wears a forest green Kathmandu jacket regardless of the weather. His bag always has a tennis racket in it. All his books have something to do with economics. He likes to read his articles on the unsightly orange couch in their shared workspace and, when he stretches his legs out, they barely reach the end.

He taught Erwin that you might know a word but that’s not the same as truly understanding it. Like infatuation. Like lust. Like want. These are things that cannot be learned, only felt.

Erwin had initiated once – of course he had. It was as winter as winter got, and he was paler than Erwin had ever seen him. “Not you too,” he had grinned with all the confidence of courting animal, pointing at the medicine and tissues near a mug of Earl Grey. But the Beautiful Man didn’t fall for such tricks. He looked at Erwin, and then looked away.

That was how Erwin understood naivety.

(“Did you know that even angels fall ill,” he messaged Mike that night.)

And so they never talk. Not even when Fortuna spins her wheel and casts them into the printing room alone. Not even when Erwin holds the door open for him and says hello.

Such chivalry is only ever rewarded with a nod. He is grateful for that much.

The Beautiful Man likes tea. He drinks a lot of it. The postgraduate kitchen is small and grungy, but as good a place as any to observe the delicate bone of his wrist when he shakes obedience into sachet of loose-leaf tea.

When he fills his mug with hot water and returns to his desk, leaving Erwin with his heart on his plate like the abandoned parts of his lunch, he begins to understand loneliness.

Loneliness feels like a vacuum.

He’s amazed that when he touches himself, it’s to the memory of his nape – that bare strip of flesh that shouldn’t send anyone of sound mind spinning into such debauchery. If only the scholarship office knew of his sorry state, he thinks. They would know regret.

Or perhaps it’s to the point of his nose – a small button of a thing that tilts up just the slightest when he first inhales the scent of his tea – that his hand travels south? Or could it be to the purse of his pink lips when he scrunches his brows in concentration, petite fingers hovering unsure over his keyboard, that he tightens and spills?

Erwin’s work day ends at one o’clock, because any semblance of concentration after that is a stubborn work of fiction. Because his mind and heart are arrested by the Beautiful Man, who sits five desks away from him and smells of something clean and musky.

He wants so badly to let go, to win back his dignity and dedicate to the abandoned thesis bleeding on his screen. To push whatever is rotting with desire inside him over the edge and start anew. And sometimes he is close. So close.

But then there’s a flash of grey in his direction. An unmistakable locking of the eyes as the Beautiful Man leaves his desk to get more tea. And Erwin is alive again, alive with the knowledge that those eyes sought him out, found him in a room full of people. He’s not imagining it…is he?

No, he decides. Impossible. One more day. One more chance.

Only the Beautiful Man could teach him madness like this.

[rollingless]

When being saved by a cute girl still doesn’t cure all your character flaws :/

(somebody call the police)

[rollingless]

I’m a little pissed about something, tell me if you agree: So everyone is always saying how beautiful it was for Levi to let Erwin die bc he didn’t want him to suffer any more... While I agree with that, i find it annoying people forget that Levi also saved Armin. I don’t think it was only Erwin in his mind, he also wanted to save Armin, to save the one who didn’t give up his dream. And I think that’s beautiful bc it make Levi even more selfless and compassionate. But pple always miss that part

@captainparadisemary said

For first time in years, I feel relief about Erwin’s death. I mean, we have to see Armin to really know what the hell happened. He’s not the same after the serum. And I’m thankful that Erwin were the same, and he died in peace. I just imagine Erwin’s suffering, and it hurts. He doesn’t have pain anymore.

I’m answering these two asks together because I think @captainparadisemary​ answers Anon perfectly.  For context, Anon sent this ask before chapter 104 came out, I wonder if they still think Levi “saved” Armin?  

I’ve already answered several asks like this and I can only repeat what I’ve said before.  Levi chose to save Erwin by not giving him the serum and by allowing him to die with dignity.  By giving Armin the serum, Levi didn’t save him, quite the opposite, he dragged him back to hell and condemned him to become a monster.  And you only have to look at Armin’s face in the new chapter to appreciate the horrific position he now finds himself in. 

There’s no doubt that Levi is one of the most selfless and compassionate characters in the series but, arguably, his one selfish act was prioritising Erwin’s humanity over all else.  The only thing that was on Levi’s mind on that roof top was saving Erwin.  Armin was unfortunate enough to suffer the consequences. 

[rollingless]

damn you val 

you made me cry

For Apricot Anon, who requested “Erwin Surives His Injuries”. I’m sorry that it took so long. It was actually a pretty difficult piece to write, and I also moved residences. But I appreciate you so much Apricot, for giving me this journey. It was miserable and wonderful. 

****** Levi knows that Erwin is going die. Surviving the Beast Titan attack was such a huge feat in itself that he knows that Erwin won’t survive for much longer. But he can’t leave the hospital. He wants to be there when Erwin goes. While he paces in front of Hange, who sits patiently, he can’t help but remember certain things. Specifically, he keeps remembering the way that Erwin knelt in front of him that first time, in the Underground, when Isabel and Farlan were still alive. Because he realizes now that Erwin was trying to show equality by putting his knee to the ground. For all of the years that he’s followed Erwin, Levi’s never taken the time to think of it that way before. But they were never equals. Erwin doesn’t have an equal. There are too many realizations at once. Levi realizes that picking Erwin up as fast, as roughly as he did might have caused more damage. He held onto Erwin too tightly while he flew through Shiganshina to get back to Wall Rose. If the impact, if the blood loss didn’t kill him, then all of the movement should have. So why were they even trying? Would it have been more dignified to let Erwin die on the roof? Armin received the serum. Levi threw the serum at Eren, grabbed Erwin and left. He doesn’t know what happened after that. Hange has tried to tell him multiple times, and he’s told her to wait. The basement doesn’t mean anything to Levi. It only mattered because Erwin wanted it. And he wouldn’t know what to do with the information anyway. But Erwin does. Levi wonders why he didn’t simply give the serum to Erwin. But he has to admit that he panicked. If he gave the serum to Erwin, then that would change a lot of things. Armin would have died. Eren would have revolted. Mikasa would have followed due to her dedication to Eren. And if Erwin was a Titan, Levi doesn’t know what that would have meant. But the thought of giving Erwin the serum was laced with the feeling of regret. Something that he couldn’t chance. Trying to save Erwin’s life was the only thing that made sense in that moment.

Keep reading

[rollingless]

tiny moments #11

The beast was daunting. It stared at Mike and Erwin and they looked at each other.

“I’m terrified”, admitted Erwin. He was pale. Mike gulped.

“Me too”, he said softly. The beast moved slightly and they winced.

“Do something”, pleaded Erwin.

“I- I can’t”, answered Mike silently. “It’s just… I can’t.” The beast moved again. It climbed the wall and came nearer and nearer.

Erwin nearly jumped. “We have to call for Levi.”

Mike started sweating. “I don’t wanna. He’s taking a bath… he’s going to get so pissed…” They both kept staring at the beast. It was disgusting. His long legs moved a bit. Erwin grabbed Mike’s hand.

“We have to get him…”, said Erwin again.

“Don’t you remember the last time?” Mike looked at him in a fearful way. “He was so angry. He’s so scary, when he’s angry.”

“I know”, answered Erwin. “But… Then catch it.”

Mike looked unbelieving at him. “What? Hell no. Catch it yourself.”

Erwin furrowed. “Please, I am the one with arachnophobia. I am getting nearly a heart attack from just seeing it.” He gave him a puppy-eyed look. “Mike… please.”

Mike looked straight in his baby blue eyes and squirmed. “Erwin”, he started. “Please, I do everything for you, but… I can’t. It’s just so disgusting. I mean… look at these legs.”

Erwin cringed violently. “Please, don’t talk about its legs.” He got even paler. “Why did you have to mention its legs?”

“Sorry.” Mike kept holding his hand. “But… I don’t wanna-” He fell silent when the beast started to crawl on the ceiling. “Oh god.”

“Oh god”, agreed Erwin. “What are we-”

And then the beast fell down. They both jumped back and screamed in a way that they would never admit later. The beast fled under the couch and they heard the opening of the bathroom door.

“The fuck?” Levi stood soaked with a towel in the door. “What the hell is going on?”

“A spider”, said Erwin and looked miserable. “It’s huge and gross and we didn’t want to interrupt your bath, but it was so huge and gross and then it fell from the ceiling and now it’s under the couch and it’s so huge and gross and oh my god.”

“It’s so disgusting”, whispered Mike and looked even more pathetic.

Levi stared at them for a solid minute. Then he sighed. “For fuck’s sake.” He sighed again. “You’re fucking killing me.”

He moved the couch and after a few seconds the beast fled in the direction of the wall, but Levi was faster. He caught it with his bare hands and pointed with his elbow on the balcony door. “Open it.”

Mike obeyed and they watched him placing the spider gently in the empty flowerpot next to the sun lounger. Then he closed the door carefully. “I’m going to get fucking angry, if my bathwater is cold now.” He started leaving, but he stopped at the door. “I wanna have a hot chocolate after my bath. And I choose the movie tonight.”

“Everything you want, dear”, said Erwin sheepishly.

“Of course”, agreed Mike ruefully.

Levi closed the bathroom door with a quiet snorting.