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[spainkitty]

the night we met but it was the song of the day for 15x20 // watch on youtube

[spainkitty]

the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” is actually not the full phrase it actually is “curiosity killed the cat but satisfaction brought it back” so don’t let anyone tell you not to be a curious little baby okay go and be interested in the world uwu

[spainkitty]

"Shoes are an evil way to oppress people and I won't wear them." cit.

Finally finished with her clothes concepts! (the first plan was doing 6 of them... Oops, I guess)

Aisling's wardrobe/story through clothes. Guess her favourite colour. Some notes under the cut!

She loves colours. She has a palette she loves best (teal - purple - yellow) and would stick to it. In Haven she just borrowed the plainest, more muted clothes she could find to blend in better with the rest and not stick out so much. Stopped braiding her hair back to hide her tattoos and look less like a fish out of water and take some attention away from herself. She had to be convinced to go back to leg wraps (it's an extra pair of Solas she adapted to her size).

The teal doublet in her Casual Skyhold attire was the one thing she really asked for when Josephine and Leliana cornered her down to choose a wardrobe that was tailored on her. She doesn't really care all that much for clothes, she just... Hinted at Josie her colour palette, the fact that she doesn't like restrictive skirts and hates shoes, and a couple of infos on how the Lavellans dress up to compliment her wardrobe and bring something of home with her.

"And then, everything changed when the Inquisition Nation attacked". I realise afterwards, I would say I'm sorry if I actually were, but I'm not.

Halamshiral: I did two variations, number 1 is more inspired by Orlesian fashion, the silhouette is Orlesian but with a Dalish twist. I like the colours and how it brings to her formal outfit, but meh. Number 2 is the one I got with and what she actually wore. She couldn't be turned down from wearing a more disctinctly Dalish style dress to that ball, she just conceded in wearing shoes underneath (no socks, she slipped off her shoes to explore the palace and silk stockings would just be pointlessly ruined). Number 3 is the more historically accurate version, fully 1643 fashion I drew for the Three Musketeers inspired series. I kept it because I'm affectionate to it.

Wedding: She pulled it out in Lavellan style in maybe half an hour, braided some elfroot for her crown and picked some forget-me-nots from a flower bed. No she's not feeling very well, the Anchor is flaring and she lost weight.

Post-Trespasser in the Fereldan countryside, embracing local hairstyles. New foot thingies Dagna designed to be easier to pull on and off by herself with just one hand. She begrudgingly admitted that skirts are not that impractical. Lots of heavy sweaters because IT COLD. I wanted to paint some tartan so here you go, there's no really any more reason to it.

[spainkitty]

Everything is like “QUEER history” and “List of QUEER young adult books” or “Top 10 QUEER movies” and queer this and queer that and for the love of god please just say LGBT.

[spainkitty]

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[spainkitty]

Fantasy books written by women are often assumed to be young adult, even when those books are written for adults, marketed to adults, and published by adult SFF imprints. And this happens even more frequently to women of color.

This topic’s an ongoing conversation on book Twitter, and I thought it might be worth sharing with Tumblr. And by “ongoing,” I mean that people have been talking about this for years. Last year, there was a big blow up when the author R.F. Kuang said publicly that her book The Poppy War isn’t young adult and that she wished people would stop calling it such. If you’ve read The Poppy War, then you’ll know it’s grimdark fantasy along lines of Game of Thrones… and yet people constantly refer to The Poppy War as young adult – which is one of its popular shelves on Goodreads. To be fair, more people have shelved it as “adult,” but why is anyone shelving it as “young adult” in the first place? Game of Thrones is not at all treated this way…

Rebecca Roanhorse’s book Trail of  Lightning, an urban fantasy with a Dinétah (Navajo) protagonist has “young adult” as its fifth most popular Goodreads shelf. The novel is adult and published by Saga, an adult SFF imprint. 

S.A. Chakraborty’s adult fantasy novel City of Brass has “young adult” as its fourth most popular Goodreads shelf. 

Tasha Suri’s Empire of Sand, an adult fantasy in a world based on Mughal India, has about equal numbers of people shelving it as “adult” or “young adult.” 

Book Riot wrote an article on this, although they didn’t address how the problem intersects with race. I also did a Twitter thread a while back where I cited these examples and some more as well. 

The topic of diversity in adult SFF is important to me, partly because we need to stop mislabeling the women of color who write it, and also because there’s a lot there that isn’t acknowledged! Besides, sometimes it’s good to see that your stories don’t just end the moment you leave high school and that adults can still have vibrant and interesting futures worth reading about. I feel like this is especially important with queer rep, for a number of reasons. 

Other books and authors in the tweets I screenshot include:

Witchmark by C.L. Polk

A Ruin of Shadows by L.D. Lewis

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Day Before by Liana Brooks

A Phoenix First Must Burn edited by Patrice Caldwell

Shri, a book blogger at Sun and Chai

Vanessa, a writer and blogger at The Wolf and Books

TLDR: Women who write adult fantasy, especially women of color, are presumed to be writing young adult, which is problematic in that it internalizes diversity, dismisses the need and presence of diversity in adult fantasy, and plays into sexist assumptions of women writers. 

[spainkitty]

Tumblr Top Ships Bracket - Round 1 Side 1

This poll is a celebration of fandom and fandom history; we're aware that there are certain issues with many of the listed pairings and sources, but they are a part of that history. Please do not take this as an endorsement, and refrain from harassment.

[spainkitty]

In this link there is definitely not a folder with every Dragon Age eBook, numbered in order of reading plus the two Encyclopedias about the world. Please do not use the link, there are not free books in there.

[spainkitty]

ok so the point i was going to make re: the circle tower and ferelden geopolitics was that the fact that all of ferelden only having one single circle, is CRAZY. orlais, a country of similar size, has FOUR; each(!!) marcher city has their own. antiva and the anderfels also have 1 circle each and they are respectively #1 a nation the quarter of the size of ferelden and #2 a barren wasteland of a place. and this is pre-blight! and i can believe that ferelden has a lower population than orlais, but i struggle to accept that ferelden has a quarter the population that orlais does. even nevarra, by all accounts an old and dying state, has 2.

there are clearly templars stationed at many chantries throughout ferelden, but the idea that they could possibly find every single mage in the country and send them to the tower is preposterous. ferelden simply does not have the infrastructure for that, neither to spread out over the whole country to hunt apostates nor to contain them all in one place. (how many people can that tower handle???)

this suggests that ferelden is generally more lax about apostates than elsewhere, which is reinforced both in da2 and inquisition when we get word that alistair (in da2) offered refuge to escaped kirkwall mages in ferelden and that alistair and/or anora (in inquisition) allowed the mage rebellion quarter in redcliffe. you could argue that alistair's decision might have been influenced by the events of dao but anora is (i say this lovingly) a bit of a hardass! rather than being moved by mage assistance in dao i would suggest instead that she is reflecting a larger ferelden attitude towards mages, which is less harsh than orlesian or marcher attitudes

we know that mages in the circle can be called upon in times of war to assist their country's army (i think that was mentioned in dao but it's stated several times in the novels). something to consider, then, is that circles are not only for containing mages and protecting people from them; but they are also for the consolidation of magic as a military power. orlais and the marcher states are creating armies. ferelden, with its sort of implicit acknowledgement that the tower doesn't hold all the mages in the country, lacks that military resource. even in the stolen throne there's only one single mage working on the ferelden side in contrast to quite a few on the orlesian side

which is why it's #1 crazy that the fereldens successfully liberated themselves from orlais #2 crazy that they defeated the blight and, most importantly, it's why you should NEVER UNDERESTIMATE A DOG LORD!!!!!

[spainkitty]

Some dragon age sketches from my sketchbook 2021

[spainkitty]

Suzanne Collins gripping my face with her hands: listen listen the first step to evil is dehumanisation, always, the second you start to see people as less than people no matter what they've done to you that's when you start heading down a path of selfish destruction and violence

[spainkitty]

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

[spainkitty]

In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.