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Voilier au clair de lune, effet de nuit French School (19th Century)

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Maybe it’s just because I have Moby Dick brainworms (brain whales?) but it bothers me when people see some weird footage of a big ocean creature and are like “NOO THAT CANT BE JUST A WHALE TJATS SOME KIND OF SEA MONSTER” because in what world is a whale not a sea monster??? It’s a hundred foot long insanely powerful beast of the ocean with the intelligence of a human that can destroy ships and swallow people whole and battle sharks and giant squids for fun. Just because they’re a well-known animal doesn’t mean they can’t also be a sea monster.

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Mina, writing to Lucy: I cannot wait to hear how Jonathan is doing on his travels! He must be having such a lovely time <3

Jonathan, in his diary: OH GOD OH FUCK HE CAN CLIMB WALLS LIKE A LIZARD NOW. I HAVE ONLY A CRUCIFIX FOR PROTECTION AND I AM GOING TO DIE TO A LIZARD MAN. THERE IS NO WAY OF ESCAPE SO I MAY AS WELL WRITE MY GOODBYES. FAREWELL MINA!!!

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Can you believe there's a tiny Dracula statue reading Bram Stoker's Dracula before the Vajdahunyad castle in Budapest

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“Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”

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hey did you know there's an album loosely adapting moby-dick that has wlw starhab specifically starbuck being ahab's secret admirer while ahab and fedallah (who is also a woman) are lovers apparently. yeah just thought i should let you know you'd seem interested (the album makes a LOT of weird choices and is not a Good adapation at all... but the music does slap and also we get canon doomed lesbian starhab hello). just to let you know

HEY WHAT THE FUCK. ANON PLEASE SAY MORE RIGHT NOW I AM PRESSING MY FACE TO THE GLASS???? CANON FEDALLAHAB AND STARHAB???? PLEASE TELL ME THE NAME OF THIS I AM BEGGING 👁💙👁

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NATIONAL HOLIDAY TODAY BTW

[ID: An edited screenshot of a Tumblr post. The first part reads: "people who celebrate album birthdays are annoying pass it on." The second part reads: "FUCK this post and happy birthday Moby Dick or The Whale by Caleb Hayashida." End ID]

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the thing is with rochester and jane is that they're insane best friends. like it's easy to call rochester weird but you cannot make an adaptation of jane eyre where you don't establish the fact the reason rochester falls for jane in the first place and why they bridge that huge gap they have in terms of age and experience is that she's the only one out there that's as weird and offputting as he is. that's literally mr and mrs bozo

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I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every tree - filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day - I am surrounded with her image!

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Stories that would be improved by polyamory:

Dracula: it's basically a novel of kitchen-table polyamory already, but this way someone might actually kiss Jack Seward.

A Midsummer Night's Dream: just let them all have an orgy at the end. I feel like they'd be into it. Puck's invited too if he wants.

Bridget Jones' Diary: why force a choice between Mark and Daniel if there was the option to have both?

Any Arthuriana: less cheating, more honesty, fewer duels, more snogging, everyone's a winner.

Stories that would be made worse by polyamory:

Wuthering Heights: dear God do not give Cathy and Heathcliff a reason to drag more people into their terrible relationship than are already involved.

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Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad!

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It frightens and discourages me how pervasive "tribal" stereotypes and imagery are in the fantasy and adventure genres.

It's all over the place in classic literature. Crack open a Jules Verne novel and you're likely to find caricatures of brown people and cultures, even when the characters are sympathetic to the plight of the colonized peoples - incidentally, this is the biggest reason I can't recommend 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to everyone, despite Captain Nemo being one of my favorite fictional characters of all time.

You can't escape it in modern cinema, either. You'll see white heroes venturing bravely into jungles and tombs to steal from natives who don't know how to use their resources "properly." You'll see them strung up in traps, riddled with sleeping darts, forced to flee and fight their way out. Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, a remarkably inclusive franchise in many other ways, had an extended sequence of the white heroes escaping from a cannibal civilization in the second film.

And when fantasy RPGs want a humanoid enemy, the "bloodthirsty natives" are the first stock trope they jump to. World of Warcraft is one of the most egregious examples, with the trolls - blatant racist caricatures with faux-voodoo beliefs, cannibalistic diets, Jamaican accents, and a history of being killed in droves by (white) elves and humans - being raided and slaughtered in nearly every expansion.

It doesn't matter how vibrant and distinctive the real-world indigenous, Polynesian, Caribbean, and African cultures are. It doesn't matter how much potential these real civilizations offer for complex and sympathetic characterization. Anything that doesn't make sense to the white western mind is shoved under the same "savage" umbrella. They're different. They're strange. They're scary. They have to be escaped, subjugated, eliminated, ogled at from the safety of a museum.

Modern writers, directors, and developers don't even seem to realize how horrifying it is to present the indigenous inhabitants of a place as "obstacles" for non-native protagonists to overcome. "It's not racist," they say, "because these people aren't really people, you see." And if you dare to point out anything that hurts or offends you as a descendant of the bastardized culture, you're accused of being the real racist: "These aren't humans! They're monsters! Are you saying that these real societies are just like those disgusting monsters?"

No, they're not monsters. But you chose to design them as monsters, just as invaders have done for hundreds of years. Why would you do that? Why can you recognize any other caricature as evil and cruel, but not this?

This is how deep colonialism runs.

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Damn, he went to work

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Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

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Currently reading Wuthering Heights so brainrot sketch

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Catherine Linton is listening to The Mountain Goats' "No Children" on repeat.

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desperately craving weird surrealist arthurania. Knights with no faces wandering through the mists. Seams between Christian and pre-Christian Britain gaping like open wounds. Beafts and visions. Maybe a monk. Maybe the monk is gay